Just wanted to tell you that it is now illegal to send any commercial electronic message in Israel (whether it's SMS, robotic telemarketing announcements, e-mail or fax) unless the reciever opted-in (as opposed to opted-out) in advance.
In preparation for the new law, in recent days lots of Israeli companies sent "please click here to opt-in or we won't be able to send you special offers, discounts, etc. in the future" messages everywhere. The company that claimed the most clicks claimed for 45%. Some others claimed for 30%. I bet the real percentages are lower, but in any case not higher. That means you're (and Spamgourmet in general is) supposed from now on to get only 55%-70% (if not much - much - less) of the amount of Israeli spam there used to be until December, 2008. That could be almost half (if not much less)!
The reason I put this in What's New here is because it sure won't hurt the usage of Spamgourmet. You probably know Spamgourmet went back to its prime in the last few days, although it probably has more to do with the downfall of the biggest spam server in the world.
And before you say "come on, they'll just use foreign servers", then do know the law doesn't really care for headers and IP addresses. If the commercial spam you got concerned an Israeli product/service, it's illegal. Period.
Actually, it's not only illegal but any recipient is welcome to press civil charges. And that is without even proving any loss. In other words, if the court agrees the message (evidence) is real, you get a certain amount of money automatically just for proving you really got the spam, unless you also want to prove the spam caused you loss of time, bandwidth, etc.
Israeli spam marketers oppose this law by claiming that (besides ruining small business that can't afford "standard" advertising) it's currently the most extreme anti-spam law in the entire world.
So I hope the admins could see this as a compensation for the allegedly large number of Israeli SMTP zombies out there...
P.S.
The reason I kept using the word "commercial" is because the law deliberately made only commercial spam illegal. It doesn't cover uncommercial spam at all, so that politicians (but as a result also chain letters, hoaxes, people who refuse to at least use BCC for their private mailing lists, etc.) would be able to continue business as usual. But for the purposes of Spamgourmet, am I right to assume most spam is commercial anyway?