DM News: AOL Blocked 500B Spam E-Mails in 2003

AOL reports that it blocked more than half a trillion spam messages in 2003. That's about 15,000 messages per user, or about three quarters of the mail. It's biggest day held 2.4 billion messages.

Spammers, attempting to avoid the spam filtering, tried to throw off the algorithms by including misspellings, extra spaces and strange punctuation, according to AOL.