I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes – and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes – will be long remembered.

Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It’s obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it’s also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren’t spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky’s illegal activities and state with one voice: “we do not do these awful things.”

But I think the marketers have to ask themselves: is there anything Ralsky was doing which isn’t illegal per se, but might still be considered spam-like in the eyes of your subscribers? Perhaps a subject line which is only slightly misleading – not enough to violate CAN-SPAM, but enough to violate the trust your subscribers have in your brand. Perhaps treating opt-in as a license to blast them over and over, until your message falls on deaf ears. If a sender acts like a spammer, even if they aren’t bad enough to get arrested, how different are they from Al Ralsky and his ilk?

And likewise, I think the anti-spammers have to consider whether following “big name” spammers is worth the effort. It seems certain that for every high-profile blowhard like Ralsky, there’s another dozen who are just as prolific – but, like most other criminals, never seek attention.

This is a great triumph for all who want to preserve email as a viable communications medium. We congratulate the United States Department of Justice and the FBI for their impressive work, and the Spamhaus Project for keeping a close eye on Ralsky’s activities for so long. But this is not the end of spam; far from it.

This article was also published by Return Path.

Please do not send us any copies or samples of the spam you receive. As a group we received thousands of spam messages every day, as individuals we receive hundreds to our personal accounts.

We are an advocacy group not a spam reporting service or the internet police. For help reporting please talk to your internet service provider or use the current tools provided to you by your web mail providers (i.e. Junk button in Hotmail, or the "Report spam" button in Gmail).

Yahoo users can feel a little bit more secure when receiving email from eBay and Paypal after Thursday's Yahoo! yodel: Say goodbye to eBay and PayPal fraudsters.

"We’ve teamed up with eBay and PayPal to become the first Web mail service to block the delivery of unauthenticated eBay and PayPal emails, reducing your risks of receiving phishing scams or fraudulent emails. Our weapon
is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender."

This is the first major announcement of this kind, be prepared for more to follow by authenticating your mail now. Not just your commercial or transactional email but also your Corporate email.

Spamhaus, the well-known anti-spam organization has been in court, sued by Chicago area bulk mailer E360. A year ago E360 got a default judgement against Spamhaus for $11 million, which Spamhaus later appealed. The appeals court has ruled, and it looks promising for Spamhaus.

CAUCE board member John Levine comments on the latest decision.

Sanford Wallace, a famous spammer from the 1990s is back, in a legal tangle with MySpace, for sending a whole lot of spam to MySpace users.

CAUCE board member John Levine writes about it in his blog.