So, just so I understand, you think that there is a non-zero chance that pillz spam is advertising legal prescription drugs, and 419 spam is offering a legitimate business opportunity?
If a situation seems obvious then it ought to be easy to prove by evidence before an impartial trier of the fact. Judges and juries aren't so blind that they would take a great deal of time to bring a guilty verdict.
So why the rush to condemn on mere accusation?
Hi. Could you take a quick look at a calendar and verify that it is now 2010, not 1995? On today's Internet, the mail flow is between 90% and 95% spam. To flip those numbers around, there are between 10 and 20 spams sent for every real message. Large providers like AOL and Hotmail get upwards a billion (with a B, 10^9) spams every day, hammering on their systems, 24/7. The only way to keep anyone's mailbox halfway usable is draconian filtering using a lot of heuristics. The people who run these systems are acutely aware of the balancing act between getting the legit mail into the mailboxes, and keep the spam out, and at some point, if you're sending mail that looks just like spam, well, sorry, it's not worth leaking a million spams into inboxes to cater to you. The suggestion that we should wait for the courts to deal with spam one at a time is so breathtakingly inane that I don't know where to start refuting it. So I won't bother, other than to suggest that it's approximately as sensible as building a network of superhighways, and saying oh, there's no need for licenses or safety inspections, we'll just have the police and the courts deal with the unsafe drivers and the accidents. Finally, your suggestion that law enforcement does not devote resources to dealing with online crime, is both stunningly uninformed and frankly insulting to a lot of police in a lot of countries who devote a great deal of effort to dealing with a really hard problem. I've personally worked with the USDOJ, the New Zealand DIA, and Industry Canada working against online crime, and I know people working onit in countries on every continent. When you have spam sent to US recipients advertising "Canadian" pills actually made in India and sold by a New Zealand citizen living in Australia, it takes a lot of effort even to identify the responsible parties. R's, John