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The report claims that current anti-spam measures such as filtering and new legislation cannot work and that charging would not only put hard-core spammers out of business, but also save money for legitimate organisations.

Forrester predicted in January this year that spam filtering, either by ISPs or at a recipient's address, would in fact increase the volume of spam. All the indications are - and there have been several surveys published this week that bear this out - that this is the case, as spammers have responded to filtering by simply increasing the total volume of spam.

They have also become, and continue to be, ever more sophisticated. Whether it's the content of messages, the masking of the sender's location or the use of fraudulent sites to harvest email addresses and other details (a process known as phishing), spammers are always finding new

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ways round new controls.

As a result the Internet is, to use Forrester's word, 'choking', ISPs and businesses are incurring huge costs, and email users are losing patience - 25 per cent say they have reduced or even stopped email usage.

Legislation will fail, says Nail, because spammers will relocate to where there aren't any penalties and will come up with new techniques to evade identification and detection.

The 'real answer to the spam problem', says Forrester, is 'to charge for email, making those who send bulk email volumes pay for the resources their campaigns use'.

'Even one quarter of $.0.01 per message would crush spammers' business model,' the report claims. 'A charge of $2.50 per thousand messages would add $2,500 to the cost of a one-million-message campaign, seriously undermining spam's economics....'

'Legitimate' businesses, on the other hand, will actually save money. Assuming a company with $500mn sales and 2,000 employees, that sends 40,000 emails a day and receives 15,000, Forrester estimates that the additional outgoing email charge would be more than offset by savings on spam filtering, bandwidth and email storage, leading to a total net saving of almost $30,000 per year.

The barriers to effective email charging, however, are immense. It would require agreement from all ISPs, a standardised authentication system and the consent of email users, which could prove the toughest obstacle of the all.