In an encouraging move for anti-spam fighters everywhere, Robert Soloway, a major spam distributor was arrested and may face decades in prison. While civil judgments had already been won against him this will be the first criminal case brought against him and is in many ways the firing of a shot across the bow of spammers everywhere by the federal government, indicating a strong forward leaning inclination to beat down on spam.

    I'm still waiting for someone to create a replacement to BlueFrog, but who knows when that will happen, and it would have to be distributed and even then one can be sure that many dedicated anti-spam proponents would suffer severe computer damage as the organized spam gangs launched a war.

    One way that has been somewhat overlooked by many that organizations are fighting spam is by creating free applications. While traditional anti-spyware/malware suits have been out there like Spybot, Ad-Aware, and Spysweeper, it wasn't until recently that major vendors begin integrating anti-malware into their core products. But the largest step forward in this area is probably Microsoft's integration of Windows Defender as part of the core Vista operating system. By doing so they ensure that every computer has at least some very basic level of defense to help prevent unsuspecting consumers from allowing their computers to become bots.