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During my daily geek news browsing today, I came across this little tidbit of information: there are more than 1 sextillion ways to spell Viagra. Of course, if you’re already using simple mail filters like the ones that can be easily created in Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook, you probably wouldn’t even see this message in your inbox if I had e-mailed it to you (the first sentence included "Viagra" and "sex," and now this sentence does, too). So, the moral of the story is that no matter how well you make your filter rules, at least one of these 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 ways of spelling Viagra will seep through. Now, if you decided to be bold and filter out every one of the combinations of Viagra in this set, the list itself would take up more than 83 zettabytes of space, assuming 8 bits per character and at least one byte as a delimiting character between each word. However, since any ASCII character can be inserted into the word Viagra, a single delimiting character probably wouldn’t be realistic, so you can multiply this last number by at least 8 for a second delimiting character: 666 zettabytes (I know, weird, eh?). For those of you still with me and keeping score, a zettabyte is 1×10²¹ bytes, or a thousand million million bytes, or simply "a lot." I just e-mailed this news to a few people, and I am just now realizing just how many more combinations are possible with HTML-encoding. For example, to encode a double quotation mark in HTML, I use ". This is six times as many characters as just the " by itself. An ampersand is encoded as &, five times as many characters as the & by itself. I don’t feel like actually figuring out the average number of characters used to encode a single character, so I’ll just make the general estimate that it’s five characters (the ampersand, a three-letter code, and a semicolon). There’s a possibility of at least twelve characters in the spelling of Viagra (besides the six letters in the original word, a character can be inserted between any of the letters or some of the letters can be created with multiple characters, such as a backslash-slash for the ‘V’). It is then possible to have at least 5¹² more variations of the word Viagra when viewing an HTML e-mail, assuming each character uses only one encoding. And that’s 3.176×10²⁹ ways to represent the word, and 1.626×10³² bytes! “A lot” is now an understatement. So, as you can see, HTML-encoded versions of Viagra make it an even more mind-blowingly huge number of ways to spell Viagra.