We'll get a more definitive answer about what August was like when the State of Spam report comes out next month. Looking at their graph it looks like there was a decline in July.

I've heard anecdotal evidence that spam has decreased. If so, it is likely because of the economy. After all spamming is a business.

I think more precisely, spamming is a double-con... the spam business cons con-artists into thinking they can make money by using spam to con some tiny but significant percentage of the public... a lot of the spam I see is clearly targeted at old people ("Top of the morning to you!") who are new to the net but not wised-up yet. I have my doubts that there are a lot of people like this left.

There is real money in spamming, so I'm sure they are doing that because it works. There may not be a lot of those people left, but they are probably more vulnerable to spam than most. Given how cheap it is to spam, even a very, very low success rate is profitable.

Eventually nobody will fall for that and spammers will move on to doing other things.