by MICHAEL CITROME

HOT WET SEX, FREE VACATION, ENLARGE YOUR PENIS. As seen in your inbox, it's spam, massive waves of unsolicited advertising e-mail. A U.S. Congress report estimates that half the e-mail on the Net is such unsolicited junk. But a local company called Vircom is taking spam and beating the ever-loving crap out of it with a brand-new software package called Modus3.

"It catches 98.2 per cent of spam while offering 99.99 per cent protection against false positives," says Vircom's François Bourdeau, referring to legitimate e-mail that gets bounced because it looks like spam. "In short, it means the end of the corporate [e-mail] spam problem."

Vircom, he says, has been tracking spam's evolution. "What was a mere annoyance a few years ago now has become a major threat to e-mail communications. Today, some spam messages include state-of-the-art code manipulations that make them very hard to detect."

Vircom's software uses an eight-stage spam detection process that analyzes the e-mail's content, checks it for viruses with a list updated 24/7 and applies a blacklist of spammers and a whitelist of known good senders.

Boudreau predicts that while corporate spam will decline in the future, electronic junk mail won't go away. "Countries where wireless communications are more developed, like in Europe and Asia, are starting to see spam spread to cell phones and other wireless handheld devices [through text-messaging]," he says. "Other channels like instant messaging are very likely targets as well."

He doesn't see anti-spam legislation, like in Australia and the U.S., as a solution either.

"What good can a Canadian anti-spam law be when messages can be redirected from anywhere in the world with a few simple clicks?"

But in the meantime, Vircom is staying a few clicks ahead of the spammers. "More and more ISPs and corporations protect their networks by making spamming less and less efficient and increasingly time-consuming, up to the point where there could be no more financial advantage for spammers and their clients to use this method to reach customers."