Imagine shopping in a store where the majority of merchandise on display was complete junk, or subscribing to a cable television service where three-quarters of the programming was devoted to unwanted ads for sexual enhancers or stock picking schemes.

It sounds implausible and in most legitimate businesses it would be. But those hypothetical scenarios help put into perspective the severity of the email spam problem. By the most conservative estimates, some 75% of all email sent today is spam. Some analysts put the figure closer to 95%. Of course, anyone who regularly loses important emails in a sea of junk mail for low interest mortgages and Nigerian money making schemes needs no statistics to understand that spam is to email what kudzu is to the South.

We are so used to it, we have almost come to accept it. But it threatens the viability of one of our most cherished communications tools, and no one can seem to stop it.

That’s not for want of trying. Scores of young companies have cropped up in recent years offering ways to separate the legitimate mail from the spam, and some have won a lot of attention. Earlier this year, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) acquired the security technology and anti-spam company IronPort Systems Inc. for $830 million. Just this month, Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) paid $625 million for Postini Inc., an email security company.

Both businesses have developed promising ways to block spam, but neither has managed to solve the problem.

So the search for a killer anti-spam technology continues. Two Israeli small caps working on a solution - Commtouch Software Ltd. (Nasdaq: CTCH) and IncrediMail Ltd. (Nasdaq: MAIL) - have seen strong sales growth and stock price gains this year.

---You can read the FULL article when you register (registration is free!) or sign-in to SmallCapInvestor.com---