PARIS: Two trade associations in the advertising and communications sectors are demanding that the French government and the European Union do something about the increasing presence in French and European Internet mailboxes of “spam,” that is, unsolicited E-mail messages, most of which originate in the United States.

Indeed, ACSEL (Association pour le commerce et les services en ligne) and IREPP (Institut de recherche et prospective postales) claim in their just-published white paper — appropriately titled “Mille Milliards d’E-mails” — that of the one trillion (thousand billion) E-mail messages that are to be sent during 2003, fully one-third of them will be unsolicited posing a nightmare for advertisers and other communicators who would like to give a greater respectability to what they send to selected clients over the Internet.

Says ACSEL chairman Henri de Maublanc, “if we don’t do something soon to better control a phenomenon that has gotten out of control.”