Have you noticed that spam is no longer the issue it once was?

Oh, it's still out there, accounting for as much as 70%-80% of all e-mail traffic on the Internet. It's just that we've learned how to deal with it.

People have become much more cautious about spreading their e-mail addresses around the Net, where spammers run automatic harvesting programs to capture everything in front and after the "@" sign. Others just routinely delete junk mail as it floods their mailboxes, hardly thinking twice about it any more.

But a lot of the credit has to go to powerful antispam filtering programs, run by both consumers and businesses.

"We believe that we have finally caught up with the spam issue and turned the table," says Ted Green, founder and president of an Ann Arbor-based company called Greenview Data, whose SpamStopsHere (www.spamstopshere.com) product claims to be able to stop a phenomenal 99% of all spam e-mail.

The good news is that claim appears to be right on. Tests run by the information-technology trade publication Network Computing Magazine found that Green's product was the most accurate spam-filtering service of the 35 leading business antispam solutions.

The bad news is his product is not for everyday folks who use Hotmail or AOL or e-mail service from their Internet service providers like Comcast, Earthlink or SBC/Yahoo.

SpamStopsHere is for businesses that run their own domain, or e-mail network. It works by having the customer's e-mail sent first to it, where the e-mail is filtered against a series of constantly updated spam databases.

"We watch this very carefully," says Green. "And our databases consistently catch about 99% of the junk."

Equally important, though, is that the amount of what is known as false positives -- legitimate e-mail misidentified and trashed as spam -- is virtually nil, with 99.9% of genuine e-mail going through.

"Companies have zero tolerance for false positives," he says. "They don't want spam, but they really don't want a customer's order or business inquiry to get deleted as spam. We pay a great deal of attention to getting rid of false positives."

The secret, says Green, is the company's massive databases, stored on 80 servers around the country. Those databases take information gleaned from the 40-50 million e-mails it processes from its 100,000 customer mailboxes and update the filtering process every five minutes.

It costs businesses about $150 a month to process 100 mailboxes through with SpamStopsHere. Most of Green's customers have been small and midsized corporations.

Green, who holds a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan, began Greenview Data as an artificial intelligence and speech recognition company 25 years ago. He spun the antispam work off in 2002 and is now concentrating almost entirely on Internet services.

"I really think that spam will simply cease to be a major problem within five years," he says. "What we're doing now for businesses will eventually trickle down to the consumer level. The Internet is much too important to let spam take over, and I think the corner is being turned."

Green sees another trend developing from the importance of e-mail that he is working hard to capitalize on: the need to store, or archive, e-mail records.

"We're talking about essential business communications now," he says.

"That's what e-mail has become. Companies need ways to archive it and manage it so that it can be easily and quickly retrieved."

E-mail storage and retrieval are not just a matter of convenience -- for the salesman on the road who needs quick access to a customer e-mail left back on a workplace desktop -- but of law, as courts have often determined that e-mail must be preserved as official corporate records.

Greenview Data will expand into that area over the next few months, Green said, as it continues to tweak its antispam technology.