For a brief moment this week, it looked like spam had been vanquished.

No kidding. The Washington Post claimed to have slain the beast. Late on Tuesday afternoon, after an investigation by the newspaper, a hosting centre called McColo Corp, which had acted as something of a spam hub, was shut down.

IronPort, an internet security firm, said it saw global spam volumes immediately plummet by two-thirds as a result. Based on the typical amount of spam sloshing around the internet, that suggests that McColo alone was responsible for pumping out around 100bn messages daily.

This victory has been short-lived. Figures from the same security firm show that as of late Wednesday, spam was already bouncing back. Volumes today have been down only 27 per cent – something of a success, but certainly nothing like the immediate drop when McColo closed.

The same thing happened when another Californian hosting centre, called Intercage, was shut down in September, a spokesperson for Ironport says. It doesn’t take long for the spammers to find another conduit for their messages.

Of the latest setback for the spammers, the spokesperson says: “We fully expect they will find another hosting service to use.”

Barack Obama may have immediate economic problems to solve but former presidential candidate Al Gore urged him on Friday to make a priority of adopting a long-term plan to tackle climate change.

“I think that the president-elect should announce in January…a national goal of getting 100 percent of America’s electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources within 10 years,” he told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The former vice-president compared the challenge to the one set by John F Kennedy for America to reach the moon in the 1960s and said Obama had the support of a generation that could achieve it.

“In Houston, in the control room [for the moon landing], the system engineers had an average age of 26, which means when President Kennedy issued this challenge they had an average age of 18. These young people that have been so inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign …want a purpose,” he said.

Mr Gore advocated the construction of a “national unified smart grid” that would cost $400bn over 10 years but would pay for itself in three-and-a-half years in terms of the annual cost to American business of $120bn from outages and other problems in the current dilapidated system.

The environmental campaigner described the grid as consisting of high-voltage low-loss underground lines feeding electricity from geothermal hotspots, solar power in the south western deserts and wind power in the mountain corridor from Texas to the Dakotas.

There should also be an “immediate national retrofit programme” to insulate homes and conserve electricity. ”We can create 10m new jobs very very quickly,” he said.

Mr Gore lost narrowly and controversially to George Bush in 2000 in a Florida recount marked by debates over “hanging chads” produced by antiquated voting machines.

On Friday, he marvelled at how internet technology had brought about Senator Obama’s victory with the boost it gave to fund-raising and getting out the vote.

“The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the internet,” he said.