The three largest US Internet firms announced plans Monday to work jointly to stem the flood of "spam," or unsolicited and often deceptive or fraudulent e-mail.

America Online, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo said in a joint statement that they would work together and with other industry members to curb what some call a plague that is choking the Internet.

"The time has come for competitors and the industry at large to work together to address the burden of spam," said David Cole, senior vice president and antispam executive sponsor at Microsoft's Internet arm MSN.

"By bringing together different perspectives and expertise, we have a real opportunity to rebuild trust in e-mail. I'm pleased to see AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft take this positive step forward."

The three firms will start "an open dialogue" on technical standards and industry guidelines that can be adopted to combat spam.

The goal, according to a joint statement, is to more effectively filter out spam from legitimate e-mail, and make it harder for spammers to set up multiple accounts that hide their identities.

A Jupiter Research study last year predicted that by 2007 the average e-mail consumer will get more than 3,900 spam messages annually.

Since 2001, Jupiter found the average amount of spam received per user has increased from 3.7 to 6.2 per day. Over the next five years, the total number of unwanted e-mail messages sent will hit 645 billion.

Legislators and regulators have been seeking ways to crack down on spam, and a number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to halt unwanted e-mails.

Spam is seen as an annoyance to individual users, but a major cost to many companies, which collectively spend billions of dollars in an effort to keep out the unsolicited e-mails that could choke their networks.

Additionally, authorities and Internet companies are concerned that the junk e-mails for penis enlargement or breast enhancement, or those directing users to porn sites, can be fraudulent or turn users away from the Web.

"At AOL, fighting spam is priority number one, because spammers are public enemy number one, both to us and to our members," said Ted Leonsis, vice chairman at America Online.

"With this joint announcement, we are making a timely, bold and critical statement: spam is an industrywide challenge, requiring industrywide teamwork, in order to yield industrywide solutions. By cooperating and collaborating together, we can make real progress against this toxin that pollutes the Internet environment."

The companies will work on four major areas:

- Preventing the use of deceptive techniques in e-mail headers specifying the sender, to better identify the location from which e-mail is originating.

- Preventing the Use of AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo's e-mail services to send spam, stopping users from creating fraudulent e-mail accounts in bulk.

- Developing new technical capabilities to filter spam from legitimate e-mail.

- Working with law enforcement where fraud is suspected.AFP