International efforts to combat spam progressed last week, as international trade body the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) outlined ways for governments to better coordinate their actions against junk emailers. Meanwhile, the UK government signed up to a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) initiative to offer advice to owners of mail servers on how to secure their systems against forwarding spam.

Delegates at last week's OECD two-day spam workshop, held in Brussels and hosted by the European Commission, were told that governments must improve cross-border cooperation on network security and law enforcement to protect the integrity of the internet.

"We need a coordinated international drive to maintain consumer and business confidence in the internet," said Herwig Schlögl, the OECD's deputy secretary-general.

Measures suggested by Schlögl included using government spending power as a carrot to encourage IT vendors to develop more effective anti-spam systems.

However, cross-border initiatives may be hampered by the fact that assessments of the problem vary, said Dave Jevans, senior vice president of marketing at email security specialist Tumbleweed, and a speaker at the event. "While firms like Brightmail, which see millions of emails a day, rate spam at around 50 percent of all traffic, a representative from the French government had a figure of only 0.2 percent," he added.

Jevans said that areas where much of the spam originates, such as Eastern Europe and Asia, were under-represented at the workshop. "Solving the spam problem will be down to the US and EU working together without input from many of these countries," he said.

In a separate move to combat spam, the UK government last week signed up to a new US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) initiative. Under the Secure Your Server project, the FTC - acting on behalf of participating governments - plans to send advisory letters to server owners worldwide, suggesting techniques to stop their servers from automatically forwarding spam.

The initiative has already been backed by 26 countries, including Korea, Brazil and Japan, an encouraging sign that nations outside the EU and US are becoming involved in the anti-spam fight. "Secure your Server is an excellent example of international partnership tackling the global nuisance of spam," said communications minister Stephen Timms in a statement.

The scheme aims to tackle the problem of open proxies and open relays, which have been increasingly abused by spammers to disguise the origin of their messages.