Why hasn't spam been stamped out yet?

The kings of spam

That's one place spam comes from. When you join mailing lists, enter your address into forms and post to online forums, you're fuelling the spam economy.

More practically, though, we can track the origin of spam down to several regions of the world.

Ahead of the pack, with double the spam 'incidents' of any other country, is the USA, with one in every six spam emails originating there. After that, every company has its own batting order – Sophos puts Brazil and Turkey in second and third place, while Trace Labs has China and Russia as runners up.

These statistics are supported by the fact that many of the biggest names in spam have come from America. At the top of The Spamhaus Project's Worst Spammers list is Canadian Pharmacy, which despite its name spams the world from the US.

In a month, a standard mail account will receive around 2,500 junk emails, four per cent of which are attributable to this outfit.

Increasingly, following the introduction of stronger American antispam legislation in 2003 (the CANSPAM Act), a set of identifiable names and faces can be associated with the darker side of digital marketing.

Sanford Wallace is one of those names. Rising to notoriety in the late '90s, Wallace has a history of exploiting marketing loopholes in new technologies. Before the net went mainstream, he sent junk mail by fax.

Recently he attracted the attention of MySpace, who took Wallace to court over his use of automated software to create thousands of fake profiles promoting gambling and porn services on the social networking site.

The company won a $234million judgement against Wallace and his business partner in May 2008. In February 2009, Facebook filed a similar complaint against Wallace for sending unsolicited marketing to its database of users.

Then there's Alan Ralsky, who received 87 months in prison and a $1million fine after pleading guilty to contravening the CAN-SPAM act in June 2009.

Ralsky is also the star of our favourite 'spammer gets his comeuppance' story when, back in 2002, an article posted on Slashdot containing his home address came to the attention of the general public. Enthusiastic web users turned the tables, signing Ralsky's address up for mailshots, catalogues and coupons.

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told the Detroit Free Press at the time. So incensed was the convicted spammer by the flood of real junk mail coming through his letter box that he claimed he was looking for ways to sue – but no action ever reached court, nor apparent irony his brain.

Not all spammer stories have a funny ending, though. Eddie Davidson's spam business Power Promoters was among the most prolific online. This all came to an end in June 2007, when he was prosecuted under the same CAN-SPAM Act that tripped up Wallace and Ralsky.

EDDIE DAVIDSON: Eddie Davidson's Power Promoters company used botnets to send out unsolicited mail selling penny stocks

Sentenced to 21 months in a minimum-security prison by the federal grand jury, Davidson escaped on 20 July 2008 and was found dead in his car four days later, alongside the bodies of his wife and three-year-old daughter.

The UK is number four in Trace Labs' current league table of spam transgressors. We're covered by an EU antispam directive in the 2003 Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and have a regulatory body devoted to digital data protection and spam control, the Information Commissioner's Office.

Despite this, there have been few successful prosecutions in the UK, and the ICO complains that they're left toothless in the face of hundreds of complaints a year. We were only able to find one successful prosecution under these rules– and that was brought by an individual rather than a state body.