SURREY, BC -- LINUXMAGIC According to the latest statistics coming from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), 'Commercial Email Offerings' have now taken over from the traditional types of spam as the leading source of 'Unwanted Bulk Email' (UBE) being sent worldwide.

This, so called, 'Grey Area Spam' has gotten so rampant that in some cases recipients are receiving up to 20 offerings per day from the same marketing company. Although many of these companies are compliant with CAN-SPAM (a U.S. legal requirement for commercial email marketers to follow), the amount of email that they send is so prolific that it is costing businesses an estimated $10 billion each year. These cost include technical expenditures and lost productivity in order to deal with the unwanted email.

Dean Russ, Chief Technology Officer of DSL Extreme, a division of Ikano Communications Inc based in Salt Lake City Utah, believes that the majority of unwanted bulk email that his company blocks for customers comes from email marketers and not the more traditional forms of spam.

"Email coming from marketers is now accounting for 72 percent of the unwanted bulk email that our company has to divert away from customers, " said Dean. "This unwanted bulk email has enormous cost implications to ISPs and network operators. It has been an annoying problem to deal with for both us and our customers. Users often accidentally subscribe to 'Third Party Offerings' but don't know how to stop it. Now that we allow blocking of 'Commercial Marketers' our costs have gone down, and customer satisfaction has gone up.

Wizard IT, a leading Canadian anti-spam solutions provider, is on the front lines of the battle to stop UBE. Michael Peddemors, President of Wizard IT, strongly supports and believes in the rights of people to limit the amount of emails they receive from marketing companies.

"The daily statistics that we receive at Wizard IT have proven to us that bulk email marketing has become so rampant that we have to be able to say 'no more commercial offerings', just the same as calling the post office and asking to stop all conventional junk mail. Our listing of email marketers, called MIPSpace, helps Internet Service Providers and email operators do the same thing for email marketing. MIPSpace has become much more popular because of the increasing volumes of this sort of mail," said Michael Peddemors.

While legitimate commercial email does have its benefits for both businesses and consumers, many marketers have abused email technology to such an extent that some people refer to all commercial email as spam.

"Users are receiving so many unwanted emails and they often don't remember signing up to receive a particular offer, or they unknowingly signed up for a third party offer when they bought tickets on-line to see their favourite rock band or booked their last vacation," said Matt Webb, Sales Manager at LinuxMagic, producers of 'MagicMail' email servers. He added, "we announced last week that our ISP class MagicMail servers will now all be shipped with MIPSpace technology because email marketing has reached such an all time high. With this technology in place, ISPs can now limit all forms of email marketing, not just the spam"

Attempts at creating national 'Do Not Call' lists for email marketers have met with limited success, or have even been abused. As CAN-SPAM compliant companies need permission to send you email marketing, some companies have found new revenues in 'selling' that permission, making it harder to discover how one gave them the permission in the first place.

But no matter how they acquire 'permission', marketers will surely increase the amount of email they send to potential customers.

A recent survey conducted by Datran Media found that 72 percent of marketers plan to employ more email marketing in 2007 and 70.5 percent will spend more money on email address acquisition. This increase will without a doubt slow down networks and take up the resources of Internet Service Providers trying to stop the UBE so it doesn't reach the in-box of their customers.

As marketers plan to increase their spending on email marketing, products like MIPSpace give ISPs the resources to help their customers 'Just Say No...' to email marketing.