Most mail clients now include spam filters, which are learning and improving themselves.
The problem though is that when spam keeps getting smarter your program has got too which still means reporting half of your spam mail as spam and checking your spam mail for your regular mail. Also when you start again after a reinstall and the spam filter has lost its experience you got to start over again.
Now, I guess it would be great to create a centralized independant organization specificly to regognize (and when it becomes successfull also extract the spammers for prosecution) spam.
The problem is how to organize such a centralized system, for when someone receives a spam email it has got to check with the centralized server whether the spam is spam. The amounts of spam are huge and doubling the enourmous bandwidth and cpu spam has costed already isn’t a very pleasant foresight.
It would be feasable however to create a spam regognition service to run on a clients computer which updates itself with the latest definitions once in a while. This would undoubtly be way more efficient.
The only problem that we are left with is how to get such a system to be intergrated with existing applications, if no one uses it it would be rather useless.
When you have some idea`s on this, please share them.