If your spam folder seems noticeably bereft of ads touting the latest and greatest penile growth techniques, or warnings from Blizzard that your World of Warcraft or Diablo 3 accounts are under investigation and they need your account info to verify your identity, well, you're not imagining things.

A giant botnet server called Grum, which was responsible for 18% of the spam flooding the internet, was recently shut down by security experts and researchers.

Leading the spam fighting charge were SpamHaus, an anti-spam group, and the California security firm FireEye, who together with Russian security experts were able to track and shut down Grum's command servers being hosted in several countries, and lastly, have Internet access to those servers severed by their ISPs.

"I am glad to announce that, after three days of effort, the Grum botnet has finally been knocked down. All the known command and control (CnC) servers are dead, leaving their zombies orphaned," wrote Alif Mushtaq, an employee of FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab.

The mammoth botnet was sending spam from as many as 120,000 different IP's, and nearly 100,000 of those had been shut down after the operation, with the remaining IP's expected to be rendered useless without any command servers left to guide their spam to your inbox.

More than just a lone victory against the forces of spam, the shutdown of such a large botnet also sent a clear message to other spammers that places they deemed as safe havens for spam are no longer so.

"There are no longer any safe havens", Mushtaq said. "Most of the spam botnets that used to keep their CnCs in the USA and Europe have moved to countries like Panama, Russia, and Ukraine thinking that no one can touch them in these comfort zones. We have proven them wrong this time."

While a significant victory, and one that Mushtaq hopes will be but the first in a series of victories that will lead to a spam-free world, there's a lot of spam to sift through yet before that day comes. For now at least, there's 18% less of it.