Would you like to help break the spammers business models?
Apparently I'm the only such person? Really? Don't you think that most people are basically good and if you help them do good things, then they will? Do you think most people want spam?
Wasting the keystrokes again, but I REALLY wish that one of the major email services would get serious about putting the spammers out of business. Playing patty-cake with filters is NOT a solution, and it is obvious the spammers don't mind at all.
However, have you noticed that one category of spam has mostly disappeared? The so-called powers-that-be decided to break the business model of the pump-and-dump stock scams, and now you hardly ever see that kind of spam. Not because we hate it as much as other spam, but only because several research papers revealed that the spammers were essentially printing money, and the powers-that-be could not tolerate that, so they broke the spammers' business model.
We could, if the powers-that-google-or-Yahoo-or-MS wanted to, do the same thing for every other category of spam. I'd be glad to help out by donating a bit of my time to analyzing the spam and helping recommend the best countermeasures--but I can't. Especially in the case of the google, it is clear that they are too EVIL to care. If you study the google's anti-spam measures, all you can say is "pitiful", but the spammers are happy.
What we need is a fairly simple iterative analysis and targeting tool for spam. At each round of analysis or targeting, the wannabe spam fighter would confirm or correct the analysis and countermeasures. Of course there should always be "Other" options, because the spammers are also sickly imaginative and there will always be new scams coming up.
I'm not saying we can cure the spammers or make them into decent human beings. I'm just saying we can reduce their profits and drive them under less visible rocks.
Remember, the number of people who HATE spam is huge, and the sucker who feed the spammers are really scarce (and stupid). If only it were easier for the large number of people to protect the suckers from themselves. (Amazingly enough, that would even protect the corporate victims from the abuse of their supposedly valuable reputations, which is the part that amazes me most. Why does the Google keep punching themselves in the face?)