You now have 66% less spam

On the right here is a SpamCop Graph showing worldwide spam over the last 7 days. As you can see the was a drastic decrease of spam on Wednesday. The reason for this decline in spam is that last Tuesday two Internet providers cut off McColo‘s (Site is down) connectivity to the Internet.

The firm was suspected of offering hosting service to, as the Washington Post describes it: “international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email”.

Several spam watching companies noticed a huge drop in spam worldwide. Email security firm IronPort estimated that spam levels fell by 66% after Tuesday.

It is not just good news that this one particular host has been taken offline and we see a sudden decrease in spam. More important maybe is that spam might be a smaller problem to fix than we originally thought.

Maybe the 80/20 rule is applicable to spam too. Maybe if we can catch 20% of the companies making spam possible we will actually stop 80% of all spam sent worldwide. That would mean that a solution for the spam problem is within reach.

We might not be able to stop millions of spammers worldwide, but we sure as hell should be able to stop a few big ones.