• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 11, 2005

America Online said Wednesday that its anti-spam initiatives have resulted in a marked drop-off in messages blocked by spam filters--to around 1.4 billion a day, from 2.3 billion a day in November of 2003. In addition, reported AOL, the company recently won a $13 million judgment against a notorious group of spammers.

Spokesman Nicholas Graham said that AOL's track record of litigation against spammers, combined with its use of spam filters, have led spammers to back off. "They're throwing in the towel," Graham said of spammers. "They know and understand that they're not going to get their e-mail sent to AOL members--so why try?" he said.

Since the mid-1990s, AOL has filed more than 30 lawsuits, Graham said, including the case that resulted in the recent $13 million judgment. That action, filed in March 2004 against Davis Wolfgang Hawke, Braden Bournival, and other anonymous defendants, was the first suit AOL brought under the then-new federal Can-Spam law, as well as a Virginia state law.

Bournival and AOL settled in January, with Bournival agreeing that he would not send spam to AOL members, among other conditions. AOL also seized a Hummer H2 from Bournival, $75,000 in cash, and a gold bullion worth around $20,000--all of which the company intends to give away in a sweepstakes.

AOL obtained a default judgment against Hawke and the other defendants for $13 million, which it's trying to collect. But actually finding the money might prove difficult. Hawke--a subject of Brian McWilliams' book "Spam Kings"--is believed to have converted at least $500,000 of his spam-related gains into gold bars, which he hid by burying.

AOL's reported decline in spam comes at a time when the overall volume of unsolicited commercial e-mail appears to be rising, according to Spamhaus, a non-profit anti-spam organization. "Spam has increased enormously in the last two years," said Spamhaus founder Steve Linford. He estimated, based on reports Spamhaus receives from Internet service providers, that spam now accounts for about 75 percent of all e-mail, up from between 40 and 50 percent several years ago.

But, perhaps as a result of spam filters, consumers by and large indicate they're not receiving more spam than in the past, according to the September issue of Consumer Reports. The magazine reported that just 33 percent of consumers said the volume of spam received had increased in the last year. (See related story OnlineMediaDaily brief, Consumer Reports: Most Online Users Suffer Spyware.) The Consumer Reports figures were based on the magazine's survey of more than 3,200 households.