US authorities are busy high fiving themselves over the arrest of Robert Alan Soloway who is reportedly one of the world’s top spammers. A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway, charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Authorities claim that we’ll notice a decrease in spam traffic arriving at our email inboxes. Don’t hold your breath. While Soloway is a top spammer, even among the top 10 in the world, he’s hardly the majority of spam. Spamhaus, a website which maintains a database of spammers around the world, claims that 80% of the world’s spam is generated by 200 spammers or spam gangs.

Spamhaus publishes a list of the top ten worst countries in the world for generating spam. Topping the list is the United States, currently with 1919 known spam issues. Canada comes ninth on that list with 120 known spam issues. That’s a list we can do with not being on.

Seems to me that while Soloway has grabbed a lot of attention, he is but a drop in the flood of spam arriving in our email. Not to diminish the accomplishment in nailing him. Every time one of them gets nailed and taken out of action it sets precedents to nail others.