Opinions range on the outcome of this, as you can imagine a lot of them varying in severity by how much the person/group giving the opinion stands to benefit from the spam problem getting significantly worse due to this.

Under the bill's current form, however, an invoice sent to a customer featuring a company logo would be against the law.

What about that product recall notice you received via e-mail offering to replace that faulty lithium-ion battery with a new one?

You guessed it, completely criminal under the proposed legislation.

...

A key difference between the Hong Kong bill and US anti-spam legislation lies in legal recourse against companies who are in violation of the law. Only Internet service providers and government agencies can initiate legal proceedings against spammers in the United States, whereas any individual can initiate a lawsuit against a company under the Hong Kong bill's current verbiage.

The trapped email looked like a legitimate message from MySpace with the subject reading - "New message from Richard on MySpace sent on Oct 05 15:40:00 -4 2006". The spoofed message even contained real MySpace addressing, copyright and privacy information taken from legitimate MySpace "New message" notifications.

"When someone sends you a message on MySpace, your registered email account is sent a notification email containing a link to your new message. In this case, the link is malicious and tries to steal your personal information," said MySpace user Kurt Thayer. The MySpace Scam Site was taken offline soon after the email was trapped due to an overwhelming amount of traffic."

Prosecutors say Smith's attempts to thwart the investigation escalated to a murderous plot in March when he allegedly tried to put out a hit on a witness while awaiting trial in the Sherburne County jail. Smith now faces a separate charge of witness tampering, but prosecutors want to play the recorded jailhouse conversation during the conspiracy trial.

You just can't make up stuff like that. Giving employees drugs, using a stun gun on them, hiring a hit man, etc - sounds like this guy needs his own TV show.

The two were identified in an investigation last year by EarthLink's fraud and abuse team into activity at its PeoplePC subsidiary. The team discovered more than 25,000 junk e-mails had been sent through 10 PeoplePC accounts that originated from Miami. The e-mails contained such subject headers as "I'm finally back home" and "I just got back in town," and contained messages that marketed herbal supplements.

In recent weeks MessageLabs has noticed an increase in the number of spam emails that are specifically targeting individuals within the technology sector by using social engineering techniques. Called “geek spam,” this type of spam includes technology-related keywords within the email to dupe recipients into believing that the spam is actually something more relevant, such as a bug report. This targeted approach using hidden keywords can help to pollute the Bayesian filters often used by technology professionals. The use of technology buzzwords, such as .NET, cpan, xss and Java, hidden inside the body of the spam can ensure that the mail looks convincing enough for limited anti-spam software to allow it through.

I'm curious as to why the spammers chose this route. I would imagine that it is a combination of the fact that "geeks" are more likely to get a lot of email, buy things online, and read bug reports.
Perhaps "geeks" are otherwise a tough market for spam since they otherwise would not click through much of the seemingly obvious spam.

As far as I know, this does not yet apply to the mobile interface for Gmail.

This is already happening to some extent, and I already wrote about contexual spam here and this is already in place. I can only assume that the "within a year" reference implies that the techniques will get better and more widespread. As it is now, it seems there is a small group of spammers doing this, and if it is working, more will pick it up soon.

A BigPond spokesman said it was now reviewing the use of comments as a measure of a blog's popularity with some changes planned in a revamp of BigBlog later this year.

"The popularity of a BigBlog will be based upon page views, not comments, so this is a lesson we've learnt from phase one of what is an ongoing project for us," he said.

Gaming the system is certainly something that spammers, by default, tend to be good at.

The quiz, launched August 15 by the McAfee® SiteAdvisor(TM) team, presented consumers with the homepages and privacy policy links of eight pairs of Web sites, and asked them to judge which site from each pair would likely guard their e-mail address. With more than 7,000 responses tabulated, the average score was only 55%, indicating that consumers are poor judges of which Web sites share e-mail addresses with third-party advertisers.

Of course, since this was seen in a press release and since McAfee sells products that supposedly helps stop spam/spyware, this would clearly have to call into question how accurate this information is, since McAfee stands to directly benefit from a "the sky is falling" scenario where users clearly must buy their software to protect themselves from... themselves.
That said, I'm pretty sure I agree that the average user has no clue.

Studies have shown that it doesn't really work any better than regular ads and that people tend to buy the products that they were inclined to buy in the first place, so the "trick" ad isn't changing their minds.

AdRants has a post up about this that also has a shot of the animated GIF used in the stock spam that was sent out.

Spamassassin on Exchange
I had been using Spamassassin an a FreeBSD system for a few years when I set out to try and get it working on an Exchange 2000 box. I wrote a hack that allowed that to work, and have documented that before on this site (here and here for example).
For a small amount of mail (certainly say within a thousand messages a day, each, for 20 users) this solution works pretty well, especially once you get it tweaked and have your white/black lists worked out and the Bayesian filters trained.
As noted by this person who tried it, it takes less than a second per email, so the better your hardware, the more you could theoretically handle. Also as that same person notes though, there are better solutions - they ended up switching over to SpamStopsHere (something I will try and cover at a later date since I don't have any personal experience with it, yet).
Do note that the best part of this option is that it is totally free and allows the admin to tinker with it and have as much control as they like. This is admittedly not always a good thing.

Built-in Features for MS Exchange 2003
Exchange 2003, especially post Service Pack 2 and 3, has some pretty nice tools built into it for blocking spam. It can query real time black lists, has an intelligent message filter (which is MS's variation on Bayesian filtering), and it makes use of Sender ID as well.
As with any of the solutions, once you get the tweaks in place and modify your white/black lists, it works pretty well.

Symantec
I must note that I haven't used Symantec's antispam solution(s). So this is not a review of their product(s) in any way in terms of that - but it is a review in the broad sense of that I refuse to let any company for which I have purchasing authority buy any Symantec product. I have had years of nothing but awful experiences with them, and I refuse to further bother with them.
So while perhaps in the past year or two they have dramatically changed, become wonderful people, and have the best product in the world - I suspect that the reality is that they are still awful.
Again, note that this is dripping with personal opinion, feel free to ignore it.

Trend Micro
Similar to Symantec above, but with a variation - I love these guys. We used their anti-virus product on Exchange and it was absolutely beautiful. Easy to install, easy to maintain, great features, and it worked perfectly. I loved it.
But... (there is always a but) we decided we wanted to upgrade to their more complex solution and get their anti-spam features in there as well. Essentially meaning that we wanted to give them more money and they would then in turn take it and do whatever it is they do with money. Presumably roll around in it and squealing with glee, I don't know.
But no, their customer service and sales department is awful and they were so rude and condescending that I cut off the transaction and am done with them. I still use them for personal computing needs, the PC-cillin Internet Security product is a good product for the price - but I won't be using them for Enterprise level applications since I don't want to reward their poor service.

McAfee
On the flipside of the other two, I don't really like McAfee in general and have heard of many issues with them. But one client of mine wanted to use the GroupShield product because that is what another consulting group for them recommended. They weren't going to be interested in anything else, so this is the route we went. The customer service wasn't relevant since I dealt with this other consulting group, and then off we went, installing it on Exchange 2003.
The install was "easy" although it took about 7 tries. I couldn't tell if this was a difficult install process, if this server was special, if the person installing it was clueless (I was on site, but not doing the install), or if the product was faulty. After looking back on it - I am going with the fact that the user was clueless (she messed up several other installs that week and so I think she hadn't done them before).
Once installed, configured, the white/black lists are setup correctly, etc - then the product works great. BUT (always the but) the UI is absolutely awful. It runs in Java and is extremely slow (on an 8 processor 3Ghz machine with 8GB of RAM, nothing should be slow) and it is not at all intuitive. It also will toss your settings and other times will warn you that you will lose changes made, but then it won't show you the changes you made - the easiest way around this is to make changes, save, and then exit the app, and then go back in. Suffice it to say, the interface is just extremely painful. On the good side, once you have it setup to your liking, you don't need to go in there that often - especially if you keep your white/black lists in separate text files and as you update them, you can occasionally just go in and reimport those instead of having to use their interface for adding.
I am torn on this product - it works really well in some respects, but it is literally painful to use in other respects.

This is enough for now - this is a long entry and has a lot of pure opinion content in it. I would rather have a few posts of factual references before I veer off on another opinion based rant... for now.