In April last year, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! began
collaborating in the fight against the ever-growing problem of
spam. Earthlink joined shortly afterwards, and since then the four
industry leaders have been working with organisations across the
industry to create technical standards and guidelines that will
stop the worldwide flood of unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Part of the programme has involved suing hundreds of spammers
under the US Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography
and Marketing Act, also known as CANSPAM.
According to reports, Microsoft has now filed over 100 actions
in its fight against spam.
The software giant announced last week that it has filed nine
further lawsuits against spammers, and that one of these targeted
National Online Sales, which is a web hosting company rather than a
direct spammer.
"This is the first action against a web host catering to
spammers," Aaron Kornblum, lawyer for Microsoft, told Reuters.
"They're providing a safe place for spammers to drive customers
to."
According to Komblum, National Online Sales had tried to avoid
legal action by basing its operations in China.
