John Ziska reports that he’s seen a dropoff in his volume of spam recently, and links it to the recent conviction and nine-year prison term for one of the top ten spammers.
Nine years for spamming: Ziska notes that it seems harsh, but if the internet is to remain useful it will have to be policed, and the scale of the net and the low cost of transmission means that the scale of damage any individual can do is huge. This one man has probably wasted an aggregate amount of other people’s time amounting to several human lifespans
Add to that the expense and bother of filtering programs and the changes in habits that spamming forces, notably not putting a click-through on a webpage.
I’ve already had serveral important messages routed to the “junk” file. There’s a whole mailbox at my markarkleiman.com address that I simply can’t open because it’s so big it crashes the computer; heaven only knows what’s in there.
So I’m glad the judge decided to make an example of this guy.
I hadn’t noticed any falloff myself, though.