i personally didnt see a decrease in spam.

I reccommend any to do what i do (if they havent already) i have two emails. One for filling out bogus advertisements, and one dedicated to friends/family and paying bills.


My spam collecting email has not showed any slow down. Not one bit. Spam is here to stay as long as internet exsists.

At work we have seen a big decrease. Our spam filter keeps track of the amount of spam we receive. We usually get around 40K emails a day with 94% spam but since the middle of the month have been around 20K a day.

I wish they would just kill all the damn spam botnets.

but I never saw a drop in spam at all, in fact I saw an increase of spam that actually made it through to my inbox immidately after the McColo shutdown. GOD I HATE SPAM!!!

This graph on the spamcop.net site is instructive: http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spammonth

Eventually I imagine we'll have a system akin to the Do-Not-Call list which they will be forced to respect, and entire companies will be dumped from all major access if they refuse to follow it, sadly America is soft on these guys, in other countries it's illegal or considerably stricter.

Heck, less than 1% of spam was legal in the US in 2004, but nothing is done about it, and it is legally permissible otherwise, yet you go over to the EU, and you basically have a carbon copy of do-not-call with strict punishments for violation.

There could be a sort of vigilante justice that could be enforced by gray hat hackers...

If hackers broke into the various botnets and forced a self-destruct of the bots that would make the bots delete themselves (and perhaps inform the user that they are/were infected?). This would significantly slow down the growth of spam.

A more draconian approach could be commandeering the botnet (and installing addition "software") and a sending the user a pop-message that they are infected with a virus, a description of the virus/worm, link the an anti-virus program and so on (in their native language of course). If the user does not react in say a week delete (rename) a core OS file which stops Windows from booting and force a system reboot. The infected computers would be taken offline for a while if not permanently but the user could still recover their data.

The problem is that as mentioned above this would involve what most countries would probably deem "breaking into" user's computer and hence an illegal action. The second approach could also create data loss in the event people had unsaved work. This why this is a vigilante approach but since governments are slow to react maybe the hacktivists could take up arms.