AOL Claims Success in Spam Fight

America Online announced Monday that for the first time in five years, it has noted a sustainable drop in the amount of spam arriving in its customer's inboxes.

Last November, the largest online service averaged some 11 million spam reports a day from its members. However, a year later that number had dropped to 2.5 million per day, which equates to a 75 percent decrease.

AOL says the success against spam results from work by its antispam division as well as increased enforcement of spam laws by authorities. This is stopping more junk mail "at the door," the company says.

"There is simply much less spam to be served up as members gather for the holidays around the family computer and their e-mail inbox," Carl Hutzler, Antispam Director at AOL said.

The company did say that spam dropped once before in 2003, however "new records for spam blocking and e-mail attempts were set shortly thereafter." Records on spam have been kept by the company since 1996.