America Online thinks spam is beginning to drop, at least in terms of junk email reaching AOL subscribers.
AOL said December 27 that total e-mail messages aiming for AOL members hit 1.6 billion a day in November, down from 2.1 billion a day a year earlier, and the drop was almost entirely in terms of spam.
Company spokesman Nicholas Graham told reporters that drop came thanks to spammers looking elsewhere after seeing many if not most of their messages won’t beat AOL spam filters – or thinking they’ll face legal action if they try.
The spammers have evidence enough for the latter, of course. AOL most recently helped build the case that landed a conviction against Jeremy Jaynes, who faces sentencing and a possible nine-year prison term in February, after a Virginia state jury convicted him under that state’s harsh new anti-spam law.
Jaynes flushed cyberspace with at least 10 million spam messages a day through 16 high-speed lines and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, at the height of the operation that made him the first known conviction under the new Virginia law, which Jaynes’ attorney has promised to appeal on grounds the law is badly written. The trial judge also said he might consider calling for review of the law.
But the Jaynes conviction encouraged anti-spam advocates such as lecturer and author (The Internet For Dummies, Fighting Spam For Dummies) John R. Levine. “They really do have fabulous spam filtering doing a fair amount of good," he said to reporters of AOL. "AOL put a guy in jail," Levine said. "If I were a spammer, I would say, 'Gosh, the cops would throw me in the slammer.'"
Email filtering company Postini said AOL’s observation of less spam makes sense since Postini noticed a move toward spamming networks and customers of smaller Internet service providers than AOL.
"Smaller companies get more spam per person than big companies do," said Postini director of product marketing Andrew Lochart, responding to the AOL announcement. "If you're a spammer, you're going to assume that somebody who's a Fortune 500 company has good defenses against [this] stuff, and you're not likely to bother."
Lochart added that spam overall remains at least level if not on the rise, with Postini showing spam between 75-82 percent of the messages routing through the company system.
