Spam, what is it good for

Spamming, as practiced today, abuses web providers and almost all recipients. It occupies a costly fraction of infrastructure and it wastes the time of busy desk workers. Effective spam-blocking systems interfere with legitimate traffic and require time-consuming procedures for senders and receivers of legitimate email. My centralized filtering system (bellsouth.net) successfully blocks porn but fails to block flesh-market, pharmacy, penny-stock, gambling and mortgage spam. That seems half hearted or incompetent.
Several years ago, federal anti-spam legislation was contemplated. During the public-comment period, I downloaded the bill in hopes of influencing the law. It was almost incomprehensible; but, from what I could tell, it would have stifled some useful email. Apparently the bill was dropped. It may be time for a class-action suit and a reconsideration of an anti-spam law.
It seems that providers could do much to identify spam sources and ban abusers from the web, possibly to block it upstream and disable relay software. If they don't already have one, providers should have an address for receiving spam forwarded from victims, the site having an artificial-intelligence system to learn spam characteristics as distinguished from non-spam characteristics, so that future email with spam-specific characteristics can be blocked at the source. Spam changes with time, but it may still be characterized by deceptive source names and addresses and deceptive subject lines, nonsense text, graphic text and presumably other deception technology.
That I receive only a few spams daily rather than 1000, suggests that the number of serious abusers is limited or there is an organization and clearing house for abusive spammers. If so, it should be possible to prosecute or sue them, were there a law forbidding abuse.
As an entrepreneur, I would love to do some shotgun emails. I recommend a law that forbids the kind of spam that we all get daily but allows non-abusive spamming, possibly once per year from a given sender to a given address for a given product. Details of how that could be implemented and enforced are over my head.
PS: Bellsouth.net has improved its filter recently (Feb '07), so I get very few spam each day.