The volume of porn spam may be falling, but those foolish enough to send porn spam aren't quite staying within the letter of a new rule – requiring the subject line warning “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: ” – which took effect earlier this month.
Anti-spam company Brightmail said that the number of porn spams sent jumped from 2 million to 2.5 million among all the spam the company measured in the first 40 hours after the new Federal Trade Commission rule took effect May 19.
A company spokesperson thinks many of the porn spam messages might still be illegal even with the new required subject line warning. "This is usually an attempt by spammers to make their messages look as though they are in compliance, when in most cases they are not in compliance with the law," Linda Munyan told Internet journalist Declan McCullagh for CNET, which asked Brightmail to perform that 40-hour analysis.
"Spammers flooding the Internet with pornographic solicitations," McCullagh wrote to begin his story. According to figures on Brightmail's Website, the company filtered more than 92 million spam messages in April and found 15 percent of those involved adult materials, which Brightmail classifies to include porn, personals, and relationship-related materials, suggesting they don't classify "adult" as strictly meaning porn.
The top spam topic, Brightmail's figures said, were "Products" – general goods and services offerings such as devices, investigative services, clothing, makeup, and other items. In second place was financial spam (at 18 percent of all Brightmail filtered spam), including investments, credit reports, real estate matters, and loans, Brightmail said. "Adult" placed third, followed by health (9 percent), Internet services and products like hosting, spamware, and Web design (7 percent), leisure activities and products (7 percent), scams like Nigerian investments and pyramid schemes (7 percent), financial fraud (5 percent), politics (2 percent), religious and spiritual (1 percent), and "other" (6 percent), which Brightmail said could not be classified otherwise.
