Harris spokesman Dan Hucko estimates the company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the meantime. David Cassel, who writes an AOL Watch newsletter critical of America Online, also had trouble at one point e-mailing newsletters to his subscribers. You also have to worry once you hand over to a big corporation the power to pick and choose which e-mail you receive. The fight against spam isn't easy. You can't even get two people to agree exactly what spam is, so you can't produce a perfect spam filter.
Most people agree that unsolicited commercial e-mail sent in bulk qualifies as spam.
Mail service providers often have to make decisions on the fly about what is spam and what is not. They've developed tools to detect mail sent in multiple quantities. They check for the fake e-mail headers that spammers use to hide their origins. Spam has crashed or slowed some mail servers, said Margie Arbon, a MAPS staff member. In other cases, companies have had to add capacity at significant cost to handle the spam traffic.