Picture the world of voice traffic on the Internet as a dark and forbidding place, rife with mobsters, con artists and shadowy sellers of dubious products.

Now picture getting hundreds of calls from these people every day. Imagine your worst day ever of telemarketing, back before the Do Not Call list, and then magnify it 10 times over.

That's the depressing future of VOIP (voice over IP), according to a report just released by the Burton Group. According to analyst Daniel Golding, the report's author, low costs brought on by outsourcing and offshoring, coupled with VOIP communications that are essentially free, can bring you exactly that kind of future, unless you take precautions.

Spam accounted for more than 80 percent of business e-mails last year, and the arms race against it continues this year. Of particular interest to enterprises is the SMTP gateway, or edge protection, to stop not only spam but also spam precursors such as directory harvest attacks.

Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., earlier this month acquired e-mail security vendor Sybari Software Inc. with plans to add Sybari's anti-spam and anti-virus software to its server products, including Exchange.

Pfizer Inc. and Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday they filed parallel lawsuits against Web site operators and spam advertisers that sell illegal versions of Pfizer's Viagra.

The companies said the lawsuits follow a seven-month investigation to discover the identity of two Web site operators together with those advertising them via spam e-mails.

A 24-year-old former American Online software engineer pleaded guilty Friday to stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers, setting off an avalanche of up to seven billion unsolicited e-mails.

The soft-spoken Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, W. Va., entered the plea to conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where he was likely to face from 18 months to two years in prison at a May 20 sentencing.

According to the SpamHaus Project--a U.K.-based antispam compiler of blacklists that block 8 billion messages a day -- a new piece of malicious software has been created that takes over a PC for the purpose of sending spam.