Savvis Communications, one of the world's largest ISPs, said it is terminating service to about 40 of its customers who have been using its networks for spamming purposes.

Two scourges -- viruses and spam -- are the most vexing e-mail issues for CIOs, according to a survey conducted by Ferris Research Inc. and Computerworld. Regulatory compliance isn't far behind.

An industry organization representing heavyweight e-mail providers Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc. and EarthLink Inc. released recommendations yesterday for ending spam e-mail.

The lawsuits are among the first filed under a new U.S. law called CAN-SPAM, which went into effect in January.

Microsoft is accusing the defendants of violating a new antispam law by spoofing their domains, routing e-mail through open proxies, deceiving customers with misleading subject lines and failing to include unsubscribe options in their e-mails.

Classifying e-mail as "good" or "junk" before it's sent to be scanned by spam filters could speed up the delivery of legitimate e-mail, according to a paper presented today at the 2004 Usenix Annual Technical Conference.

America Online and Yahoo plan to begin using technology to verify the source of e-mail messages in coming months as both companies work to stop spam e-mail.

While IP addresses in the U.S. made up just 28% of the spam-sending addresses in a survey by CipherTrust Inc., those addresses sent out much more unsolicited commercial e-mail than spammers from other nations.

The technology hasn't been widely adopted, but spammers are taking it up at a faster rate than legitimate e-mailers.

America Online Inc. has decided not to fully support Microsoft's Sender ID spam-fighting plan citing intellectual property concerns from the Internet Engineering Task Force and the open-source community.