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They found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.

they just discovered this in 2002? ... this has been known for years ... maybe they should have asked and somebody would have told them ...

There's an easy way to cure spam, declare a spammer as somebody who sends 5 or more unsolicited emails per day ... bill the companies who advertise with spam, by the receiving server (like Yahoo!, AOL, a private or public company) $5 per incident for receiving / storing unsolicited email ... have employees / recipients forward spam to cental collection ... generate the bill ... when they don't pay, file a lawsuit and shut 'em down one-by-one ...

that will cure 90% of spam inside 6 months ... guaranteed ... permanently ... sue the advertisers ... pass the bill in Congress ... done deal ...

Well, this does sound like a scientific survey. They tracked the email addresses, how they were used, how much spam each got, etc. So, it's better than just anecdotal evidence.

Anyway, I get about 100+ spams per day. A lot of them come to strangely-named addresses at my domain that I've never used. Example: elephantitis@mydomain.com. I'd imagine that some of these came from email address harvesters who wanted to pad out their list which they sell to spammers.

Some of them come from ijits who work at a large company one of whose servers has the same name as my domain. For instance, they entered fred@mydomain.com in some online spam form, when they meant fred@mydomain.ibm.com

As far as your idea is concerned, the abuse departments at earthlink, aol etc. probably already work that way. If they get enough complaints they decide to sue. It would also be open to abuse: if people didn't like someone, they could complain that the email they got from him was spam.

An interesting study would be to look into who keeps the spammers in business by buying their crap. If no one bought from spammers, the problem would solve itself.