EU telecommunications ministers meeting in Brussels promised to speed up slow implementation of an EU-wide law agreed two years ago banning commercial spam, which experts say now accounts for more than half of all e-mails.

"We have agreed next steps in the national and international fight against spam in order to prevent it undermining consumer and business confidence," EU information society commissioner Erkki Liikanen said in a statement.

"There are still things to be done, but we have moved a further step in the right direction," he said.

The EU ministers said they would stop up cooperation among their governments, taking note that spam is a cross-border problem that requires international solutions.

The EU notably wants companies to solicit the consent of recipients before sending them bulk e-mail, in a legal requirement called the "opt-in" condition.

Campaigners want governments to go further and enable users to "opt out" of receiving any spam at all, by registering on a central database.

The EU promises of action come after the US Congress agreed a law in November designed to rein in the spammers.

Without banning unsolicited e-mail, the law enables Internet users to have their e-mail addresses removed from mailing lists and also calls for heavy fines and prison terms for those sending messages of a fraudulent or pornographic nature without warning recipients first.

But the so-called "CAN-SPAM Act" -- which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act -- has had little effect since going into effect on January 1, computer experts say.

E-mail security firm Postini said spam accounted for 79 percent of all the US e-mail it processed in January, compared with 80 percent in December.

The cost of spam for businesses and ordinary users is meanwhile rising.

A recent EU study estimated that the worldwide cost to Internet subscribers of spam is around 10 billion euros (12.4 billion dollars) a year, not least because of hours lost deleting such messages from e-mail in-boxes.

Bill Gates, chairman of the world's biggest software firm Microsoft, has promised to eradicate the span problem within two years.

Last month Microsoft announced a series of plans and industry partnerships to improve Internet security and to curb spam with a system to verify the identities of e-mail senders.

But according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which last month co-organised the EU's first conference on the problem, governments need to act together.

"We need a coordinated international drive to maintain consumer and business confidence in the Internet," OECD deputy secretary-general Herwig Schloegl told the seminar in early February.

The conference coincided with the infection of more than one million computers around the world by the Mydoom e-mail worm, which underlined the vulnerability of IT systems to malicious spam.

SPACE.WIRE