Spam Killer

Product Idea to fight Spam:

Problem: Everyone is completely fed up with Spam. In fact, I just received THREE copies of the same spam email purportedly from "Gore Vidal". (If only Mr Vidal knew that his name was being used to sell photos of underage girls through spam...)

Solution: Use the combined filtering of everyone on the web to automagially weed out email from people's inboxes before they read it. How? Develop a mail reader (Outlook) plug-in that scans each piece of mail and develops a signature for that mail. Each user reading the mail can identify it as "Spam" and the plug-in will register that vote in a central server. After a threshold of votes is realized in the central server for a piece of mail, a piece of mail can be identified as "Spam." When mail is downloaded into the client, the plug-in contacts the server to see if any of the new mail is Spam.

Business Model: Interestingly enough, this is likely a bootstrappable business. Set up the server, offer the plug-in for free for non-commercial use. Commercial use is $50 per client.

Update: Someone's already doing this idea: SpamNet. Also, I downloaded it and it works very very well. Has caught all of my spam so far and hasn't made any mistakes yet. Very nice.