E-Mail filtering firm MX Logic has released data regarding the level of spam messages entering their system, which is down to 67% of its traffic from 73.66% for the first eight months of 2005 as opposed to the same time period in 2004. US government measures, such as the CAN-Spam law (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) and more efficient spam filters installed by isps and e-mail providers are cited as reasons for the drop in unsolicited advertising messages. However, the FTC issued a sobering warning; the amount of malicious phishing e-mails (as opposed to the annoyance of spam) have sharply increased since CAN-Spam passed.

Text of the CAN-Spam act. (GigaLaw)
Phishing IQ Test (MailFrontier)
Source: BBCNews

The Misoneist Says: I receive about ten e-mails from "PayPal" everyday asking me to confirm "new e-mail addresses" added to my account to extract sensitive information from me. It's aggravating enough to make me seriously consider cancelling my account even though they're not responsible. Whatever happened to the rumors about a service to compete with PayPal by Google? Perhaps eBay, a large source of advertising income for Google, had some negative things to say about it.