‘Porn is Passé’ in Spam, AOL Spokesman Says

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.— Most spammers are not dealing in porn, according to Internet heavyweight American Online, which released its annual report Dec. 28 on the Top 10 junk emails of 2005.

Instead, offers for penis patches and a personal note from Donald Trump were the most likely to pass unsolicited into the email boxes of unwitting consumers throughout the country this year.

“Donald Trump Wants You,” was the most frequent spam to come through AOL this year, according to Nicholas Graham, a company spokesman.

Pornography was practically non-existent, quite a jump from last year, when the same report ranked “STEAMY HOT LESBIAN ACTION LIVE ON CAMERA!” as the 4th most sent spam of 2004.

“Porn is passé when it comes to spam,” Graham said, pointing to consumer education and the advancement in filtering technology as principal reasons for the shift.

Graham said AOL filters blocked more spam messages this year than they did in 2004, snagging around a half-trillion spams.

At the same time, however, the number of AOL users reporting junk emails declined by 75 percent over the last two years, he said.

AOL’s latest Top 10 comes just a week after the Federal Trade Commission published a report on the “Effectiveness and Enforcement of the Can-Spam Act,” in which it estimated nearly 70 percent of global email is spam.

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