World Spam News

New Zealand's largest service provider Xtra is going to start filtering outgoing port 25 (email) connections. This will stop its customers from sending email spam (or at least slow them down), but will have the unwanted side-effect of inconveniencing many customers with legitimate needs to send email. The ability to send email to the mail server of your choice was a useful thing and now its loss is one of the hidden costs of spam. See NewstalkZB story Xtra targets spam.

UPI reports that Israel is being swamped with political spam. According to the article, 59% of email reaching the average Israeli's inbox were spam, and 36% of the spam was political. See Report: Israelis report election spam.

The Age, Australia, reports that The Australian Communications and Media Authority is threatening to hit email service providers with massive fines -- up to $10 million -- if they do not provide spam filtering. See World first code to crackdown on spam. It may sound draconian, but it works. The article reports that Australian spam has dropped from 2% to 1% of the world's total. The article also goes on to mention that the spammers themselves face fines up to $1 million.