Where's My Spam?

The above graph is a visual report of our email traffic from Exchange Defender. The orange and blue represent spam. Notice something curious? Yep, there's hardly any orange and about half as much blue. So what happened? A miracle! Unfortunately it's temporary.

big providers of Internet connections named in it -- Hurricane Electric Internet Services and Global Crossing Ltd. -- acted quickly to cut ties to the core subject of the document, a little-known Silicon Valley company called McColo Corp. that rents out servers to clients.
The researchers didn't say whether McColo knowingly aided criminals, but they described some of the nefarious activities conducted on some websites the company hosted. Among other things, McColo reportedly enabled its customers to control vast networks of hijacked computers to send spam and take payments for fake anti-virus software

Basically an Internet company in California was shutdown by amateur spam researches who concluded that several large companies were aiding McColo corp in the delivery of spam. Those companies got scared by the allegations and shut down their connection to McColo corp. The impact was enormous and it has reduced spam by 65% worldwide.

Eventually it is expected that McColo corp will find new providers for its Internet activities and will be back to pushing spam. In the meantime, we can enjoy reduced spam, and faster delivery of email.

I guess we should consider it a holiday gift that we get some of the bandwidth back that we pay for and some of the productivity back that we lose by managing spam. But obviously our anti-spam laws are not working at all. If they were then McColo and his enablers would all be sitting in jail. I hope that re-writing the Can-Spam law is on the agenda for the new Congress.