In case you haven't heard, the FTC wants you to forward spam to them at uce@ftc.gov. But they're not the only ones who want your spam.

So does Spam Archive. Their goal is to accumulate a nice cross-representative sample of spam, for example, to use in seeding Bayesian filters. It's taken me about a week to accumulate 146 spam messages and with that sample set, now my Bayesian filter works more often than not. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to go download an archive of, say, a couple thousand spam messages and seed a Bayesian filter with that?

Some Slashdotters questioned the group's motives. The admin contact on the site has connections to a commercial anti-spam company. If this is a front for a for-profit company and they benefit from the contributions, I say so what? I'm not one of those "everything should be free" people. I certainly hope they will keep their word and make the spam archive available to all comers. And if they do that, I really couldn't care less who benefits.