A Florida-as-spam-central scenario was suggested last year, when a noticable dip in worldwide spamming levels coincided with the four hurricane hits to the Sunshine State.

So, when Hurricane Wilma knocked out power in most of Broward County (and big chunks of Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties), did spam correspondingly lessen? If so, it pretty much fingers the state as home to a bunch of spammers. If not, then 2004’s results could be considered a coincidence.

Personally, I didn’t notice any change in the amount of email junk I got during the last full week of October, when Wilma hit. But I do have an anecdotal bit of evidence that Web use in Wilma territory dropped: The traffic reports for Florida Trend, which I run every month, showed a sizable dip for October. Since most of our traffic comes from instate, I didn’t even have to look at the details to know that the decrease was attributable to the hurricane outages.