The reason is the Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on the porn advertisements and recently settled a complaint with spammer Cyberheat for almost half a million dollars. FTC spokeswoman Sana Chriss says they are getting the bad guys.

“This case stems from a crackdown on x-rated spam that we initiated in July 2005.”

The FTC claims the overall volume of pornographic spam has decreased because of the crackdown and Charles Var with the spam blocking company MX Logic agrees.

“We’ve noticed in the last two months that pornographic spam has actually decreased significantly since January through February as much as 50 percent. There’s billions and billions of e-mails and when you talk about the broadest category of malicious messages, that being spam, spam actually can make up as much as 90 percent of all e-mail traffic seen out in the world.”

Pornographic spam makes up only about one half to three quarters of a percent of all spam. Chriss says you can help reduce even that percentage.

“When you receive a spam message send that e-mail to the FTC. We want your spam.”

The e-mail address is spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam to build criminal prosecutions.