Today Yahoo! announced a big milestone in the fight against spam – we were awarded a $610 million judgment against spammers responsible for creating a fake Yahoo! lottery email scheme. This scheme was perpetrated against email users and led them to believe that they were being offered a lottery prize from Yahoo!. You can read about the actual case and the judgment issued by a New York judge here.

As a leader in anti-spam protection, we are constantly looking at how we can win the war on spam, and take several different approaches to help keep our 300-million Yahoo! Mail users as safe as possible. On the technology front, we are continually updating our technology engine to stay one step ahead of spammers. In fact, Yahoo! Mail blocks more than 600 billion spam messages each and every month (that's over 7.2 TRILLION spam messages we block each year.) And, since introducing an updated version of Yahoo! Mail in May this year, we’ve reduced the amount of spam reported by our Mail users by an additional 60%.

More importantly, today’s ruling shows that Yahoo! goes after spammers. In a big way. We initially started building this specific case back in 2008 and have diligently been pursuing it since then. Why? Because we are vigilant about protecting you, every other Yahoo! User and the online industry in general. We do not, nor will we in the future, hesitate to bring legal action against wrong doers who are engaging in fraudulent activities across our platforms.

Is the fight against spam over? Not by a long shot. Every day the spammers try to figure out how to stay one-step ahead of the good guys, and every day Yahoo! employs the latest technology we can to stop them.

But what we can say is that today Yahoo! won a major round against spammers.