Ever wonder who is behind those spam mails that flood our inboxes?

Meet Alex "Blood" Polyakov, or a few of his other aliases, who tops off the Spamhaus stats as the world's most prolific spammer. The word unsavory does not begin to describe this Ukrainian who operates a large spam operation, including a child-porn spam ring, controlled through a massive botnet of infected PCs.

The Spamhaus Project, an anti-spam organization that is working to do us all a service, has published a revised list of the world's 10 worst spammers. The site is definitely something to take a look at; you can browse names, pictures, and locations of the top ten spam offenders. You can also view lists of shame in terms of the worst countries for harboring spammers without laws to stop them, and the worst networks that knowingly sell service to professional spammers, or who do nothing to prevent spam.

Spamhaus says that up to 80% of spam targeted at Internet users in North America and Europe is produced by a "hard-core group" of around 200 known professional spam gangs. Their names are all documented in Spamhaus' Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO).

The organization also has a real-time database of IP addresses of verified spam sources, Spamhaus Block List, that is available as a free service to help weed out junk mail.

Let's hope that giving a name and face to spammers will help to stop them from polluting our e-mail accounts!