dr. robert epstein, the uc san diego psychologist, editor of "parsing the turing test" and co-founder of the lobar prize subscribed to an online dating service in the winter of 2007. he began writing long love letters to a russian woman named ivana who would respond with long letters of her own describing her family, her daily life and her growing feelings for epstein. eventually, though, something didn't feel quite right. long story short, epstein ultimately realized that he'd been exchanging lengthy love letters for over four months with, you guessed it, a computer program. poor guy. it wasn't enough that web ruffians spanned his e-mail box every day, now they have to spam his heart. [laughter] on the one hand i want to simply laugh at the guy. he founded the loebner prize turing test, for christ sake. what a chump. [laughter] then again, i'm also sympathetic. the unavoidable presence of e-mail spam in the 21st century not only clogs the inboxes and bandwidths of the world. for example, roughly 90% of all e-mail messages are spam. we're talking tens of billions a day, you could literal