A "John Doe" lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, this morning could be one of the largest anti-spam suits ever filed in the US so far. The suit was filed by Project Honey Pot, a free anti-spam service that collects information on e-mail address harvesters across thousands of sites on the Internet that have their software installed. The class-action complaint was filed on behalf of roughly 20,000 Internet users in more than 100 countries, according to the organization's web site.

Because of webmasters large and small installing its software on their servers, Project Honey Pot has collected information on thousands of e-mail harvesters in the US—people or bots that automatically scan web sites for e-mail addresses and then store them in a database for sale to a spammer. The organization hopes that by filing the "John Doe" suit, they can use that information in conjunction with subpoenas to find out who the actual spammers are.

The lead attorney in the case is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group. Praed has achieved quite the reputation as a "spam hunter" in recent years, as he has successfully represented AOL and Verizon against spammers.

Under Virginia's anti-spam statute and the federal CAN-SPAM law, Project Honey Pot's case could result in more than $1 billion in statutory damages against spammers. Although CAN-SPAM has been around since early 2004, the inability of lawmakers to find or identify the spammers in question has led to an increase in spam over the years instead of a decrease. However, Project Honey Pot's approach could actually yield some results, founder of myNetWatchman Lawrence Baldwin told the Washington Post. "If they're successful, I think it will yield some very usable information in terms of identifying who the real miscreants are. Let's just hope some of them are here in United States and therefore reachable," he said.

Project Honey Pot appears to be fully committed to the fight for its users, and although they acknowledge that spam won't go away even if the case succeeds, they hope that the case will help scare spammers in the future. The organization even says that should it win, it may give back to its community: "Since we will know what Project Honey Pot members provided the data that ends up winning the case, maybe we'll be able to send them a little bonus," wrote the company.