They say (whoever "they" are) that good things come in threes, and that certainly seems true for law enforcement against spammers this week.

In New York, Adam Vitale was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $183,000 in restitution for a week of spamming AOL back in 2005. He's also allegedly linked to advertisements for prostitution on craigslist, and is already in jail for even worse crimes.

In Illinois, an FTC settlement requires Spear Systems and company executives Bruce Parker and Lisa Kimsey to give up $29,000, stop making "false or unsubstantiated claims about health benefits" of their products, and bars them from violating CAN-SPAM ever again. Related litigation continues against defendants in Quebec and Australia; you may remember this gang as the hoodia spammers.

And finally, in Seattle, the Robert Soloway case continues. He pled guilty back in March to wire fraud, CAN SPAM fraud, and tax evasion, but not identity theft -- which was dismissed. Even so, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years, though that's reportedly unlikely. The difficulty for the judge appears to be that there isn't a lot of precedent for how long spammers should spend in jail. CAUCE would encourage Judge Marsha Pechman to look for precedents from other, non-internet-related fraud cases, multiply by the number of victims, and throw away the key.

But what makes the Soloway case particularly interesting is what else is being revealed. Soloway's business model was to sell advertising services, promising that all of his recipients had opted in -- even though none of them had, so it was 100% spam. This reportedly earned him over $1 million in a 3-year period, along with many extremely unhappy customers and nearly $18 million in judgements thus far.

So that's three more down, but many more to go.

(Note on the Soloway case: CAUCE President John Levine testified for the prosecution during both the trial and the sentencing.)

I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes – and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes – will be long remembered.

Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It’s obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it’s also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren’t spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky’s illegal activities and state with one voice: “we do not do these awful things.”

But I think the marketers have to ask themselves: is there anything Ralsky was doing which isn’t illegal per se, but might still be considered spam-like in the eyes of your subscribers? Perhaps a subject line which is only slightly misleading – not enough to violate CAN-SPAM, but enough to violate the trust your subscribers have in your brand. Perhaps treating opt-in as a license to blast them over and over, until your message falls on deaf ears. If a sender acts like a spammer, even if they aren’t bad enough to get arrested, how different are they from Al Ralsky and his ilk?

And likewise, I think the anti-spammers have to consider whether following “big name” spammers is worth the effort. It seems certain that for every high-profile blowhard like Ralsky, there’s another dozen who are just as prolific – but, like most other criminals, never seek attention.

This is a great triumph for all who want to preserve email as a viable communications medium. We congratulate the United States Department of Justice and the FBI for their impressive work, and the Spamhaus Project for keeping a close eye on Ralsky’s activities for so long. But this is not the end of spam; far from it.

This article was also published by Return Path.