GREAT FALLS, VA. ? The nearly 170 million online adults in the United States spend an average of three minutes each day deleting spam, which when you factor in the average working wage, costs the U.S. economy almost $22 billion annually in lost productivity.

This data comes from the 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey, produced by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland?s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates.

?We all know that spam is a nuisance, but this allows us to assign a real value to what it is costing U.S. society,? said Roland Rust, director of the Center for Excellence in Service. ?A $1 billion solution doesn?t sound so outrageous in the shadow of a $22 billion-a-year problem.?

Findings from the 2004 NTRS regarding spam ? defined as unsolicited e-mail from unknown sources sent to several e-mail addresses simultaneously ? include:

Nearly four out of five (78 percent) adults receive spam on a daily basis and 11 percent of the online population receive at least 40 spam e-mails a day;

Of those online adults who do receive spam, 14 percent open it to see what it says;

In the past 12 months, 4 percent of online adults purchased a product or service advertised in a spam e-mail;

Two-thirds (68 percent) of online users sweep their accounts clean of spam at least once a week. More than one-quarter (27 percent) delete spam on a daily basis. A small proportion (13 percent) delete spam no more than once a month;

Nearly a quarter of online adults (22 percent) report they tend to get no spam at all;

Currently, private companies such as American Online, Yahoo and Microsoft are working to develop solutions to spam including researching ways to verify that the address listed on an e-mail is authentic. Legislation on the state and federal level is also being enacted such as the national CAN-SPAM Act and an October 2004 Maryland law instituting fines up to $25,000, and up to 10 years in prison for convicted spammers.

?The problem with these measures is that generally the private solutions being developed are not universal and the legislative ones are not enforceable,? said Charles Colby, president of Rockbridge Associates. ?While nobody really wants to change the freewheeling nature of the Internet, we?re suggesting that there be greater collective impetus to invest in fundamental, maybe even drastic, changes.?