Mark Pilgrim sums up the spam issues in an insightful post.

He comments on possible solutions and their effectiveness, noting that custom, isolated measures will not solve the problem in a satisfactory way. A article mentioned in his post points to the need of a distributed effort to cope with worms.

I think the same reasoning could be applied to spam. Blacklists are a step in this direction, but they are limited and sometimes penalize people good netizens which happen to be using the same network a spammer hijacked. But if the community works together, we may come up with a solution that makes spam costly to spammers — or less attractive, as Mark also puts it — and at least reduce the amount of spam flooding our mailbox everyday.