[Spambayes] fighting spam

[Tim Peters]

[James Calfee]
>>> I see you have a popular project on Sourceforge.  I have a similar
>>> dis-taste for SPAM (don't we all), so I have made a considerable
>>> investment by writing a SPAM complaint program.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Please have a look, the web site is http://spamcomplaint.net ...

[Thomas Hruska]
>> Soooo....your tool basically makes the spam problem worse.  Can I
>> complain about your tool?

[Amedee Van Gasse]
> Agreed, most spam is forged anyway, including forged mail headers. Once an
> email has left the MTA phase, everything has become untrustworthy. The
> mail client is not the place where you can identify the spammer.
>
> If I ever get backscatter spam from spamcomplaint, it won't take me long
> to block it on my mailserver.

While I haven't used the program in question, and its FAQ left details
unclear to me, it appears to send complaints to various "abuse"
addresses associated with the claimed IP of the sender.  There are
examples on the site of replies from abuse departments, mostly from
assorted ISPs saying the info supplied by the program was sufficient
for them to track down the spammer using their system for delivery.