IBM last week introduced technology called FairUCE, for Fair Use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, that blocks spam by trying to ID the sender's Internet domain rather than evaluating message content.

FairUCE aims to stop spam at the perimeter, before it becomes a burden to business networks, says Marc Goubert, manager of IBM's alphaWorks, a Web site for downloading emerging technology. FairUCE sends a query that, if an E-mail's domain is spoofed, must be answered before the message is delivered. That puts a challenge's labor and bandwidth burdens only on those marked as spammers.

But identifying spammers is an inexact science. "A lot of spam these days comes from hacked machines," says Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc.

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