In an effort to combat the exponential growth of Internet junk email (about 8 percent of all e-mail traffic in late 2001, about 40 percent today) AOL, congress, state courts have all taken strong anti-spam action of late. Now the FTC has filed suit against prolific porn spammer:

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Illinois, alleges Brian D. Westby of Missouri violated federal laws by sending e-mail whose deceptive subject lines, such as "What is wrong?" and "Fwd: You may want to reboot your computer," camouflaged the actual content: images of scantily clad women and links to 20 porn Web sites Westby operated, many of them featuring "married but lonely" women.

FTC officials said its spam database, which is receiving about 120,000 e-mails per day forwarded by citizens, collected 46,000 from Westby's various endeavors.

The agency further alleged Westby used "spoofing" — a common spammer practice that disguises the Internet address of the computer that sends the spam — and provided a means of unsubscribing from e-mail lists that did not work.

The complaint said Westby has netted more than $1 million from his porn operations. [Washington Post]