Good news that they are stopping them; just think how much faster the web would be without all of them tho...
"America Online, Inc., the world"s leading interactive services company, announced that this week it had blocked one billion spam emails from reaching its members in one day. Reaching this important anti-spam landmark comes less than two weeks after AOL announced that it was successfully blocking over three-quarters of a billion (780 million) spam emails from reaching its members, while also updating its members about the steps AOL is taking to further fight spam. By working together on spam, AOL and its members are helping to prevent more and more unwanted emails from reaching members" email inboxes. AOL is now stopping an average of more than 28 junk emails from reaching each account on a daily basis.
By my calculations, that averages out to over 11,570 spams blocked per second. Of course one wonders how much of that spam is originated from within AOL itself. Briefly looking through my spam today, I"ve spotted more AOL.com spoofs than not, but there"s still junk coming through there. Yet, at least they"re making an effort. Perhaps with more data collected on this, we can get Washington (or insert your .gov here) to do something about this. The idea that a company like AOL should have to pay for "spam" to clog its networks is ridiculous, especially since those costs are only being passed on to the user. If people were having to pay a little bit each time 3 J. Crew catalogs showed up in their mailbox, you can bet there"d be action. But since it"s spam, it"s somehow magically different."