Richter's company, Westminster-based OptInRealBig.com, has filed for bankruptcy protection in Denver. The company cited a costly legal battle with Gates' Microsoft Corp., which claims OptInRealBig.com illegally spams computer users.

Microsoft officials called the filing a victory. "Microsoft and the state of New York said we would drive him into bankruptcy, and together we have," said Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement attorney. "The kind of spam Mr. Richter was sending was not only annoying, it was illegal, and the law sets out penalties for this kind of illegal activity."

"They asked if we wanted to settle with them, and we told them where they could go stick it," Richter replied to Spitzer in a Denver Post article.

He claimed his company operated legally and made $15 million a year sending 15 million e-mail messages a day.

According to a survey conducted by security firm Mirapoint and market research company the Radicati Group, nearly a third of e-mail users have clicked on links in spam messages.

The fact that one in ten e-mail users are buying things advertised in spam continues to make it an attractive business, especially given that sending out huge amounts of spam costs very little, the report concludes.

"The list of words most commonly hidden by the spammers from anti-spam software reveals that most spam is about the old favourites: money, drugs and sex," said Mr Cluley.

"People must resist their basic instincts to buy from spam mails. Spammers are criminals, plain and simple. If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs," he said.

Plenty of us use Google's Gmail accounts on a daily basis. I, for instance, obtained my first account back in early June, 2004. It only took me 10 months to fill Google's until then considered "huge" storage space. See, one gigabyte is not so much after all when you start leaving all your email on the remote server.

Back in February, I started getting nervous when the space-metre at my Gmail account hit "95%". I asked my contact at Google in the UK what would happen when the account reached 100%. Would email start bouncing back to sender? Would I be alerted and given the option to "upgrade" for a fee to a bigger storage space?

Well, nothing like that ever happened, because Google's person never got back to me with her responses, and as you can see below, email keeps pouring in, and my Gmail account is already showing "102%" of space used.

Until Google figures what to do with those of us with full Gmail accounts, and if you don't want to risk losing your email due to bounces, you can use a trick. Open a secondary Gmail account, and then configure Google's forwarding option to forward every inbound message to your secondary one, selecting the option "trash it from the inbox" so you don't end up with duplicates.

The card companies joined forces with scary-sounding U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to block the sales of cigarettes over state lines.

A spokesman for the AFT claimed its investigations showed, "that millions of dollars each year in illegal sales of cigarettes are diverted to fund terrorists and criminal organizations."

In some states – such as New York - the sale of tobacco products over the Internet is banned. The ATF claims that many New Yorkers buy their fags from other states in order to get around the ban - depriving the state of an estimated $100 million a year in cigarette sales taxes.

Market research outfit Jupiter Research has published a study that shows more than half of Internet users delete cookies. This seriously undermines website operators' ability to measure consumer behaviour on their sites, the report said.

Eric Peterson, analyst for Jupiter Research, said that most users feared that if they took cookies from a site they will have their personal details blasted all over the interweb or get sucked into spam campaigns.

Peterson said such moves were making it impossible for companies to do any monitoring of customers and the problems caused by cookie deletion were going to get worse.

He said that website operators need to look for new technologies to solve the problem. He thinks more companies will start using Flash to track consumers each time they visit a site.

A new Ohio law that will take effect in May will have the unintended consequence of requring residents of that state to get auctioneer licenses and be bonded in order to sell items on eBay. In order to obtain an auctioneer license, Ohioans will need to pay a US$200 license fee and post a US$50,000 bond. Along with the out-of-pocket costs, sellers will have to attend an approved auction school, undergo a one-year apprenticeship to a licensed auctioneer, and pass both oral and written exams.

The question of government regulation of eBay sellers is an interesting one. A number of Power Sellers manage to make a nice living purely through eBay, which offers group health insurance and other benefits to that group. From an end-user point-of-view, it often appears as though oversight by eBay is somewhat lacking. The feedback system is an imperfect one, often functioning as an exercise mutual back-scratching. Furthermore, getting eBay to take action against shady sellers can turn into an exercise in frustration with little apparent result, a topic that has been a frequent topic of discussion at a coin forum I frequent.

They combine the classic melodies of the Beatles with the heavy-metal thunder of Metallica, but the rock band Beatallica certainly isn't music to Sony's ears.

Sony's publishing arm, which owns the rights to the Beatles catalogue, has ordered the Milwaukee band to take down its Web site and pay unspecified damages for recording songs like "Leper Madonna" and "Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice".

But on February 24, Beatallica received a letter from Sony/ATV Music Publishing demanding that the band take down its Web site and pay Sony "an amount to be discussed."

The Utah governor is deciding whether to sign a bill that would require Internet providers to block Web sites deemed pornographic and that could also target e-mail providers and search engines.

Late Wednesday night, the Utah Senate approved controversial legislation that would create an official list of Web sites with publicly available material found to be "harmful to minors." Internet providers in Utah must offer their customers a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges.

A letter that NetCoalition sent to the state Senate earlier this week said the wording is so vague it could affect search engines, e-mail providers and Web hosting companies. "A search engine that links to a Web site in Utah might be required...to 'properly rate' the Web site," the letter said.

Kanoodle, a search-advertising specialist, wants to help turn blogging into small business.

On Monday, the company is expected to introduce a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle's keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.

New York-based Kanoodle and Moreover, based in San Francisco, have been testing RSS advertising for more than six months, and according to Pitkow, the tests have been profitable.

Late last month, administrators and service providers began seeing virus-infected messages with a new type of attachment hitting their mail servers: an .rar archive.

The emergence of .rar-packed viruses highlights the lengths to which virus writers are willing to go to evade anti-virus systems, as well as the limitations of those traditional signature-based defenses.

Experts say .rar files carrying viruses have been sailing past commercial anti-virus products and finding their way into the mailboxes of users, who are often unfamiliar with the file format. Administrators who have seen .rar-packed malware say that none of the messages have been stopped by their anti-virus defenses.

"Most users have finally gotten trained not to open .zips and executables, and now we have to worry about this," said the administrator, who asked not to be identified. "Our [anti-virus system] doesn't catch these yet, so we have to block it at the gateway in order to stop them."