Consolidate your debt! Enhance your manhood! Get a college degree without taking any classes!

Billions of spam messages pitching offers like these flood inboxes daily and account for more than 85 percent of the world's e-mail traffic. Many people have accepted spam as a part of Internet life and learned to ignore it, yet it continues to pour in.

Do people actually buy this stuff?

"If it didn't work, they (spammers) wouldn't be doing it," said Don Drake, a technology consultant from Arlington Heights and the creator of MailLaunder, a system designed to help small and medium-size businesses stop spam before it's delivered.

"It's cheap to send millions of e-mail messages," Drake said, adding that the practice has proven so profitable that "spam gangs" devoted to sending bulk e-mail have cropped up.

The conversion rate for spam advertisements is estimated at about 0.00036 percent. That means that for every million e-mails a spammer sends, about three result in a sale. Depending on the cost of the product being sold and the commission given to the spammer, this could translate to thousands of dollars of revenue at little or no cost.

State anti-spam laws were pre-empted by the federal CAN-SPAM Act, signed into law in 2003. But state laws -- including Illinois' -- are limited to criminalizing common deceptive tactics used in sending spam, such as forging the identity of the sender or hiding the origin of the message.

David Sorkin, a professor of information technology law at The John Marshall Law School, said CAN-SPAM has been mostly ineffective at canning spam.

"I don't think that it has had a huge impact up or down on the amount of spam," Sorkin said. "I think we probably get at least as much spam now as we did before CAN-SPAM took effect."

Sorkin said that most spam is discarded before it reaches a user's mailbox. The real problem with unsolicited e-mail, he said, is the cost to server operators in resources and users' in time.