This is obviously a big boost for legitimate email marketers around the world. No one likes receiving spam, yet it constitutes an estimated 90% of all sent email. Many spam operations have been prosecuted by the FTC in the past, but HerbalKing is “perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.”

To give you an idea of just how big HerbalKing’s operation was, consider this: they could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. That means that HerbalKing sent more messages in a few days than legitimate, permission-based email marketers sent during all of last year.