Ironically, Outing's recent column for Editor and Publisher on why he hates spam filters was trapped by a spam filter and not delivered to his editor.

"I purposely loaded the column with some words that filters tend not to like to make a point about not wanting to be censored by software," Outing said. "I e-mailed it to my editor at E&P, but it got blocked by the spam filter installed on his company's server."

"This was particularly annoying, because the filter was set to just trash what it identified as spam; my editor had no way of knowing I'd sent him anything, and I didn't get a bounce-back message saying I'd been blocked."

He eventually had to e-mail the column to his editor's home e-mail address.

"The root of the problem, of course, is spam," Outing said. "Spammers not only annoy the majority of Internet users and suck up ISP bandwidth, they also cost ethical e-mail publishers money. The ultimate solution is to outlaw spam. I doubt there can be such a thing as a perfect spam filter."

Habeas' success will depend on how aggressively the company pursues violators, and how many people opt to use the service and notify the company of any spam they may receive that was "sanctioned" by Habeas.

Individuals can freely use Habeas filtering with their existing e-mail programs. The service is also free for Internet service providers. Businesses will be charged $200 a year for use of Habeas' services.

Commercial e-mailers who meet Habeas' strict definition of non-spam will be billed a penny per sent message for the warranting service, capped at $3,000 per month.

The fee may seem steep for small-scale publishers and marketers, but some said it would be worth it to guarantee their product would actually arrive in subscribers' in-boxes.