One of the most annoying things about Facebook is the amount of spammers attacking the social media site. As popularity in social communities rise, spammers have started to target these sites aggressively. One online marketer recently got slammed with a hefty suit awarding Facebook $711 million in damages.

While YouTube is enjoying the success of averaging 1 billion videos viewed per day, spammers appear set to start invading the service in earnest.

There was I thinking that the problem of spam had been pretty much solved due to spam filters and Web users applying a little more common sense these days than they used to. But no, it seems that people are still receiving tons of spam each year, and some of those people are even responding to the unsolicited email. Many are buying Viagra. And making things hard for themselves.

Spam email has been with us for over 30 years now, having celebrated its birthday in May 2008. With that in mind, surely it’s been with us long enough that no one is now fooled into responding to the offers of mail order brides or penis enlargement solutions. Apparently not.

Prior to the official announcement that Michael Jackson was dead, there was a flurry of rumors going across the Web causing much confusion. Many sites were reporting that Michael Jackson was in a state of deep coma while others were reporting of his passing. It has been found that devious hackers have taken advantage of this confusion by leveraging virus and spam attacks disguised as Michael Jackson information.

A man who used spam to manipulate stock prices may spend more than seven years behind bars. Alan M. Ralsky is one of five men to plead guilty to a rare combination of spam and wire fraud charges.

The Federal Trade Commission has closed down an Internet service provider described today as “nefarious” and the “worst ISP in [the] U.S.” And that’s some of the nicer things people have said.

Last September’s demise of long suspected malware host Intercage may have decreased spam by 8 percent in one month, but spammers are finding new tricks to keep up their trade. In fact, a recent report shows that nine out of every ten emails are spam.

Several college students were indicted this past week, charged with fraud and email spamming. The email spamming scheme crippled the networks of colleges and universities all in an attempt to sell products to fellow students.  The method in which the spamming was done has come under fire.

Recent findings on the total cost of spam email converts these costs to environmental impacts. The amount of spam email sent on the Internet wastes enough energy to drive around the world not once, but 1.6 million times in one year.

MySpace is preparing to release a full-fledged webmail product to its 125 million user community in the coming months. While most of those users are inactive or indifferent, MySpace email could be the perfect spammer’s paradise.

Twitter continues to grow in both users and notoriety. But that means one thing: an increased chance of the site being targeted by spammers and the like. TweetTornado is there to fill that gap in the market.

Google has begun live testing of a feature displaying multiple inboxes. Whilst a little fiddly, it should make organizing e-mails considerably simpler.

Here are a few updates on some stories we’ve recently featured on our TECH channel:

The recent rash of metric based applications that use follower count to determine “influence” are pushing the social media landscape in a wholly unwelcome direction. Do we really want to continue down this path and create a problem of Nigerian Spam Mail proportions as the atmosphere becomes more rife with get-rich-quick schemes and smarmy snake oil salesmen? I hope not, since the trust factor of social media has always been its biggest asset.

Just two weeks after a rogue hosting firm’s closure slashed spam levels by 70 percent, unsolicited e-mails are back on the rise. The world’s biggest spam network appears to have risen from the dead and laughed in the faces of feeble humans attempting to prevent its return.

A Montreal resident has been fined $873 million by a San Jose court for sending spams through a popular social networking site. But Adam Guerbuez is probably going to feel more pain from the other element of his court punishment: a lifetime ban from Facebook.