The stock market was plummeting Monday. Everything was crazy. And as if that weren't enough, Salomon Smith Barney in Alexandria, Va., was inundated with strange phone calls. [USA Today]

The European parliament has bungled its latest attempt to outlaw spam. [The Register]

A European committee has blocked plans to outlaw unsolicited commercial email dealing a major blow to anti-spam supporters. [The Register]

Lobbyists for the European Internet industry believe their campaign for a ban on spam is gaining momentum. [The Register]

Two Los Angeles men are to go to jail for their part in a bulk email scam which duped 12, 000 people and severely impacted the operations of several large US ISPs. [The Register]

ISPs are battling rogue spammers lurking in the back alleys and hidden corners of their networks. As the fighting heats up, more and more legitimate e-mail is getting blocked along with the junk. [Wired]

Ben Johnson has been sending e-mail for months from his Hotmail account, but he just discovered that some of them were diverted to the trash before arriving at their destination. [CNET.com]

In what some see as a perfect example of the evidence of cosmic retribution, an avalanche of spam has crashed British Internet service provider Pipex's servers, and stopped delivery of e-mail to its million-plus users for the past week. [Wired]

MSN has signed up with Brightmail to stop its email users getting spammed. The ISP will offer its five million email users in the US the option of Brightmail's Anti-Spam Solution. [The Register]

Spam costs Net users a whopping E10 billion ($9.33 billion) a year, according to the European Commission. [The Register]