When law enforcement authorities took down this week an international ring of Internet grifters who allegedly scammed more than $14 million from their victims, a key element of their crackdown was a spam database maintained by the University of Alabama-Birmingham.Created in 2006, the UAB Spam Data Mine churns through a million spam messages every day and now contains some 550 million junk e-mail messages in its database that can be used by law enforcement agencies to analyze activities such as spear phishing, advertising fraud, and identity spoofing.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243748/spam_researchers_help_bust_global_cybercrime_ring.html