Myspace is making news with its judgement against "Spamford Wallace" (MySpace wins $230 million in Internet spam case) the infamous junk mailer behind Cyber Promotions. (which was sued out of business by AOL) Despite this, I doubt this is the last we'll see of him.

People like this are a huge nusiance to any communications company, but did you know that grin.net rejects, at delivery time, 80% of all email?

Out of what does get delivered, half the rest goes to spam boxes, and we STILL get complaints about spam being a major problem for many of our customers. That's a 90% spam ratio, and our users tell us that this statistic is on the low side of what actually constitutes spam.

That means, if spam suddenly stopped existing tomorrow, our servers would only need to be 1/10th as powerful to handle our mail load. In addition to that drop however, the filtering infrastructure could also go away, which would reduce mail load again to somewhere around 1/4 of that load. That means our servers are somewhere around 40x as powerful (and power consuming) as they really need to be.

This is one reason Spam is such a big deal, and why companies like MySpace persue it so aggressively. The other reason is because of who is behind the spam. Think about this for a moment: Spamming in most every form you will see on a day to day basis, is illegal. That means virtually every spam in your mailbox, is being sent by a criminal who not only knows they're breaking the law, but are actively taking steps to avoid the filters set up by others to keep their mails out.

And these people... are asking for your credit card number, bank account information... and sending you products, the origin of which you don't well know.

I'd think twice (actually, no, I wouldn't) before doing ANYTHING these people ask, even if it's just "visit this web site" or "do you know the time?" The latter should be recognizable to most women as something a mugger will ask a mark to get them to look away for a brief moment. (Long enough to grab the purse and start running) The former is the equivalent mark of the spammer, and should be treated the same.