We're off on an issue break this week, well it's not really a break for some of us on the news desk who'll be carefully vetting the hourly news with the same vigour and eye for detail as always. And yawning a lot and eating donuts perhaps. But a slow news week allows little gems such as this one – which may have otherwise lain hidden under a pile of announcements about servers, storage devices and switches – percolate to the top of the pecking order.

AOL, whose mistakenly-released database of users' search strings I am still belly-laughing my way through (yesterday I read what a foot-fancier from North Carolina likes to do in his or her spare time – believe me you don't want to know) is putting all its powers of search and retrieval to the test in trying to collect on the $12 million plus in damages owed to it by an uber-spammer. According to reports, the search giant is considering digging up the parental home of convicted spammer and so-called "kosher Nazi" Davis Wolfgang Hawke to get back its filthy lucre. There were suggestions that Hawke has buried gold or platinum bars at that thar place, although this remains to be seen.

Nice to see the big corporates getting tough on the spammers, though some pre-emptive action to prevent these sorts so easily targeting AOL members in the first place may have been a little more effective. VP of technology for IronPort, Patrick Peterson, recently told me that although sender verification initiatives like Sender ID represent a great chance to cut spam, it will be a long time before they are ubiquitous. In the meantime, it would be good, as countless commentators before me have noted, to see a more proactive approach from the ISPs to cutting out this curse of the inbox.