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AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo! have filed six complaints against hundreds of defendants, which the companies say include 'some of the nation's most notorious large scale spammers'.

AOL executive vice president and general counsel Randall Boe, said: 'Consumers should take note that the new law not only empowered us to help can the spam, but also to can the spammers as well - and we'll do that, one spam kingpin at a time if necessary. Our actions today clearly demonstrate that Can-Spam is alive and kicking - and we're using it to give hardcore, outlaw spammers the boot.'

The complaints range from breaches of the Can-Spam Act including falsified sender addresses and no unsubscribe or physical address details to the deceptive nature of the emails and nefarious methods of distribution such as using infected PCs to relay the spam.

The new federal law offers strong civil remedies, including statutory damages, for false and misleading email transmission, at up to $100 per violation per email, and with no cap.

And as a federal law, spammers can no longer hide behind the more lenient or flawed state legislation that has allowed them to continue their activities to date - Can-Spam applies throughout the US.

Microsoft's Tim Cranton said: 'Can-Spam is a critical new weapon in the arsenal to contain spam. It provides a unified, national standard for filing lawsuits against spammers, contains strong enforcement provisions for ISPs and state attorneys general and criminalizes specific, deceptive techniques used to disguise the content and origin of email.'

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spokesperson told us that the effects of the suits will be felt by the spamming community as soon as the courts allow. 'All of Microsoft's lawsuits seek injunctions, by which the court prohibits individual spammers from continuing illegal operations. Violation of such injunctions is punishable by contempt proceedings, a true legal bar to continuing operations. Second, monetary judgments in lawsuits create a significant disincentive to continue illegal spamming. Third, the knowledge that legal action has been taken and will be taken in the future changes the calculus for spammers and would-be spammers.'

Cranton added that these are just the first steps in the measures being taken to combat spam both on the legal and technological front. 'Microsoft will continue its anti-spam efforts until the problem is solved for its customers - by filing lawsuits against the world's top spammers, advocating for effective legislation, enhancing spam filters and other anti-spam technological innovations and collaborating with industry and government partners to support their efforts,' he said.

The complainants represent the founding members of the Anti-Spam Coalition formed last April and say that the filings were only made possible by 'substantial corporate co-operation'.

The lawsuits target US-based spammers, responsible for the majority of the world's junk mail. Sophos recently monitored global spam over two days and found that 56.74 per cent of it came from the States. The next worst offender was Canada at comparatively trifling 6.8 per cent.

But Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, thinks that Russia should come under closer scrutiny for its spam-related activities. 'Our intelligence suggests that a large amount of spam originates in Russia.... Hackers appear to be breaking into computers in other countries and sending out spam via 'infected' PCs. Some Trojan horses and worms allow spammers to take over third-party computers belonging to innocent parties and use them for sending spam. More than 30 per cent of the world's spam is sent from these compromised computers, underlining the need for a co-ordinated approach to spam and viruses.