Microsoft’s Bill Gates predicted three years ago that the problem of junk e-mail would be solved by 2006. Here it is 2008, and it is time for a progress report: Not much. The torrent of unwanted offers of penny stocks, fake Swiss watches, sexual partners and impotency remedies continues to swell.

A leader in the anti-spam field, Secure Computing, says that the global volume of junk messages has escalated from about 10 billion a month in 2005 to a peak in October of 130 billion. About 80 percent of all e-mail messages are junk, and that ratio is rising.

It costs little to send out those billions of come-on messages. Only about .02 percent of them draw responses. That’s a tiny figure, but the huge volume makes it profitable.

The struggle against spam is never-ending, like an arms race. When the protectors devise a new system, the bad guys think up something else. Anti-spam services scanned for key words so the spammers began using pictures instead of words. When the filters checked for identical pictures, the spammers programmed slight variations. Congress passed the federal Can-Spam Act of 2003, requiring the spammers to let recipients get off the mailing lists. But the senders moved their operations overseas to Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia, out of reach of American law.

The Federal Communications Commission reported in December that filters could keep the vast majority of spam from landing in consumers’ inboxes. Still, it called spam “one of the most intractable consumer protection problems faced by consumer users.”

High-end anti-spam services now can help big companies by weeding out most of the junk before it even reaches their computers. Individuals often use more affordable services, which identify most of the incoming spam, keep it out of the inboxes but deposit it in special junk folders. The user doesn’t see these intercepted messages until notified that the junk box is nearly full. Then the user can go through 100 or more messages to look for any legitimate ones that had been caught by mistake and then remove the rest.

So the war against spam goes on and on. No one seems to have any idea of how to plug it at the source without jeopardizing the whole system of modern communication.

So, people just live with the problem, just as they live with a cell phone system that keeps them saying, “You’re breaking up,” and asking, “Can you hear me now?”