The recent discovery of a major host of spam senders might lead, at least for a certain amount of time, to a lower volume of such e-mail received by users everywhere.

The firm, called McColo Corporation, was located in an office tower in San Jose and used the servers located in the building to host a series of services for a large number of companies involved in advertising through e-mails all sorts of products, from pharmaceuticals and counterfeit designer goods, to useless Internet security products and even child pornography.

The company’s Web site was shut down and the two Internet providers offering the service, immediately cut its access to the Web.

For now it is still uncertain if the company’s officials will also be charged for the actions of their partners, as the matter must be further investigated. According to some estimates, the company was responsible at times for more than 70 percent of all spam.

Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-abuse engineering at Symantec, explained that McColo was one of the biggest hosts involved in these spam activities and since it was taken down two days ago, the spam traffic recorded a significant drop. Still, he added that the authorities’ constant efforts to stop the phenomenon will surely push the spammers into seeking international hosts, in order to ensure that their actions will be harder to identify, control and stop. These relocating actions are time consuming and also demand a lot of finances, and this is why Mr. Bowers believes that "The aim in terms of global spam, is to increase costs for spammers. Despite making a lot of money, spammers have a low profit margin," he explained for BetaNews. Considering the costs, the hustle needed and the potential punishments, some of the people involved in this industry might turn to another activity.

"I completely expect the criminal operators that were 'pulling the strings' in McColo to redeploy their operations elsewhere," said Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro Inc., adding that "That's almost a given."

The authorities expect McColo’s former clients to regroup over the next few days and find new ways of getting their ads to consumers. This means that the problem is far from being fixed and that the efforts made to identify the hosts and also the clients must be sustained.

Senderbase.com, IronPort's spam-monitoring service, released a report to show the impact of the takedown: from November 4 to November 11 there were sent an average of 154 billion spam e-mails; on November 12 the numbers dropped to 112 billion and yesterday’s estimates were of only 64 billion. Just as the other companies stated, the report also noted that the trend isn’t expected to last.

Other reports presenting McColo’s activity noted that the millions of spam messages sent ensured the company’s clients a very good traffic, with more than 20,000 daily visitors fooled into clicking the links.