Those pushing Vioxx prescriptions have finally knocked porn advertising off the top of the spam heap, but that may be in part because filtering is catching more porn spam, America Online said December 28.
The bad news: the United States is still the leading spam source in cyberspace.
Spam marked “Hot Lesbian Action” still made the list of most frequently sent spam, but porn displays are getting caught more easily in AOL and other Internet service providers’ filters, AOL said, adding that spam is now most characterized by “deceptively simple text messages and Web addresses” linking to sites.
AOL’s comments followed their announcement a day earlier that their subscribers had received 75 percent less spam this year thanks to better filters and blocks built into their email programs, findings they based on a poll of complaints the company put together.
Meanwhile, anti-spam and anti-virus software maker Sophos said almost half the spam in 2004 came from the United States, based on scanning spam messages received at its worldwide network of “honeypots” this year, with South Korea a very distant second. The U.S. accounted for about 42 percent of the spam Sophos analyzed, with South Korea holding 13 percent.
That was down from 57 percent in Sophos’s last such tally in February, before the U.S.’s new CAN-SPAM law began showing progress.
But Sophos’s annual tally and similar lists from vendors like Postini and MX Logic show the U.S. topping the world’s spam production, an indication the CAN-SPAM law, which took effect this year, is seen predominantly as ineffective, especially with spammers constantly shifting techniques and increasingly using malware to create zombie computer networks to flush around their spam.
MX Logic says between 30 and 50 percent of the spam they analyzed in April came by way of such zombie relays, and 69 percent of what they analyzed in November and December was sent that way.
CAN-SPAM’s main sponsor, U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana), continues to defend the law. "Senator Burns has said from day one that enforcement is key for this legislation to be effective," Burns spokesperson Jennifer O’Shea told a tech news service. “We have seen several big lawsuits, which have been helpful, but we need to continue to see more of these lawsuits in order to keep up with big time spammers and keep spam out of inboxes."
O’Shea also said Burns thinks businesses should have the chance to market over e-mail rather than having to get opt-in permission from all e-mail recipients. "The opt-out provision… gives the email user the responsibility of opting out if there is something they do not want to receive messages about," she said.
