Four of the largest email providers, Microsoft, America Online, EarthLink and Yahoo, have announced they are suing some of the biggest spammers under the United States' new (JK: and deeply flawed) Can Spam Act.
Since a small group of spammers are responsible for a large percentage of the spam you get, this could be encouraging. Let's see the follow-through... and let's also see whether the same companies mentioned above continue to stall more meaningful anti-spam legislation.
The downside: this may be the death of the small ISP.
One of the problems of the CAN-SPAM act is that it removed all right of individual action against spammers; if the ISP does not have the resources to sue the spammers which are overwhelming its users, there is no other remedy. The solution (if you want to call it that) is for users to move to AOL, Earthlink, or one of the other major networks. The small ISPs, however well-run compared to the faceless majors, will be left to bleed their users as they suffocate under spam.
I'm sure that the big ISPs had this in mind when they were lobbying for the bill, but I'm a cynic.
The lawsuits don't include entities like Robert Allen or teamvisionbuilder.com (a HerbalLife front). So, we are probably stuck with "legitimate e-mail marketers" i.e. spammers, for a long while.