Legitimate email marketers, anti-spam groups and beleaguered recipients got a bit of good news with the arrest last week of a man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

Robert Alan Soloway, 27, dubbed “the Seattle Spammer” by federal officials, was indicted on 35 charges related to fraudulent Internet activities. Soloway pleaded not guilty to all charges at his May 30 arraignment. You can read more here.

Although it’s always great when a notorious spammer gets put out of business, such actions probably won’t result in a drop in the amount of spam that gets sent. Illicit spam rings have sprung up across the globe, and more and more spammers are delivering more and more spam than ever into people’s inboxes.

According to this Online Times article, email security firm IronPort said there hasn’t been any notable drop in the volume of spam since Soloway’s arrest, with 70 billion messages in a 24-hour period, unchanged from two weeks earlier. The company also said the volume of global spam has doubled from about 36 billion a day since last May.

Hopefully, highly publicized arrests and increasingly stiffer penalties will send a message to spammers that they face very real consequences for their actions. But in the end, as long as people continue to buy things from spam, there will be people to send it. And as long as spam is profitable, there will be more of it, not less.