An article by the author of Paul Graham: A Plan for Spam. Here he examines whether and how mail filters will influence spammer behavior in the long term. Some really interesting stuff in it, definitely worth reading!
An excerpt (and my favorite part of the article): >The person who responds to spam is a rare bird. Response rates can be as low as 15 per million. That's the whole problem: spammers waste the time of a million people just to reach the 15 stupidest or most perverted. > > > >If we want to make spam stop working, we have to somehow prevent the 15 idiots from responding to the spams that are sent to them. Otherwise the spammers will keep sending it to everyone. So, strangely enough, whether or not filtering will kill spam depends entirely on what those 15 idiots do. >
So we are all dependent on the fate of 15 idiots per million network users. Wow. It's almost like real life.