America Online (AOL) has cut spam on its service for the first time in five years.

AOL says it has slashed the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 per cent.

"AOL today announced that it has successfully stemmed the huge tidal wave of spam, releasing numbers showing that the rise of Internet spam targeted to AOL has been halted and, in fact, reversed for the first time in more than five years," a company statement said.

In November, reports of spam had plunged to 2.2 million from almost 11 million a year earlier.

The company says the amount of spam email being diverted to AOL members' "spam folder" had dropped to 40 million a day from 100 million in the same period.

Also, the daily average amount of Internet spam emails blocked by AOL filters has been halved to 1.2 billion in late-2004.

AOL anti-spam director Carl Hutzler says that downward spiral in spam had been sparked by improved AOL countermeasures, improved enforcement by government authorities and by AOL, under tougher US federal and state legislation.

"There is simply much less spam to be served up," Mr Hutzler said.

"We're seeing a substantial drop in the number of spam messages reaching AOL members' spam folders.

"That means one thing: many spammers are raising the white flag of surrender for the first time since 1999."

Source