US spam kings closed, 70% fall in junk mail

The internet cheers as US web hosting firm shut down

November 13th 2008 | Tell us what you think [ 3 comments ]

Spam levels fall 70% this week, following Washington Post investigation

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A web hosting firm believed to have major spam gangs as its clients has been closed down, leading to a 70 per cent global fall in the levels of junk mail.

US ISPs teamed up to shut down McColo after evidence was presented that the company was host to spam kings, according to the Washington Post.

McColo was taken offline on 11 November and Ironport, the anti-spam company, reports that junk mail has fallen by a whopping 70 per cent over the last two days.

Spam will return

Ironport spokesman Jason Steer told the BBC: "It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny."

The Washington Post claims that McColo hosted spamming gangs running botnets spamming out malware.

Annoyingly though, Mr Steer added that: "Spam levels will come back to normal as we build up to Thanksgiving and Christmas."

Earlier this week we reported how an amazing 1 in 12,500,000 spam emails actually garner a response.