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AOL Says It Sees Sharp Decline in 'Spam' E-Mail

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By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - America Online, the nation's largest Internet provider, said on Friday it has seen a dramatic decline in the amount of "spam" e-mail entering its network over the past month.

Other surveys have shown that the amount of spam has not declined since a national anti-spam law took effect on Jan. 1. But AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company had seen a 27 percent decline since Feb. 20.

Spammers attempted to send 2.6 billion messages to AOL members on Feb. 20. That figure declined steadily and reached 1.9 billion on March 17, Graham said.

Over the same period, AOL saw its daily number of complaints from members about spam messages not caught by the service's filters drop by nearly half, to 6.8 million from 12.7 million. Graham attributed the decline to improved filtering techniques and fear of litigation under the new law.

"We hope spammers are thinking twice before hitting the send button," Graham said.

On March 9, AOL and several other large Internet providers sued hundreds of e-mail marketers in the first test of the new law.

But U.S. Internet users said in a survey released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that spam was more irritating than ever.

Get-rich-quick schemes, miracle cures and other unsolicited bulk messages accounted for 62 percent of all e-mail in February, according to filtering company Brightmail Inc.

Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam, up from 25 percent who said so last June.

AOL is a unit of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news).

March 21, 2004 at 11:20 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home