I view external mail filtering as a form of censorship and I strongly oppose censorship. It is bad when it comes from the government, but it is worse when it is imposed by those outside of the government. The reason for this is simple: in most cases governments have to legitimise and disclose what they are censoring. Businesses do not have these restrictions.
So why oppose admins who try to protect their systems from spammers? Because it is counter productive. whabang started this thread by commenting that his system was used as an open relay. Now think about why was his system comprimised? By blacklisting the spammers original, and presumably legitimate, means of spamming people they forced the problem on to other people. So now you still have the old problem and you have created a new one. I also attribute the general lack of quality of spam to the anti-spam fascists because they have forced anyone who markets legitimate products out of the market. Guess who's left? People selling drugs, sex, drugs for sex, and so forth. I very much doubt that we wouldn't have seen much of that crud in the first place if spam didn't earn a bad reputation in the first place. Just consider how many porno-flyers you see in your snailmail box. None, I would hope. And I some how doubt that the profit margins on drugs and sex are lower than those on a head of lettuce.
The reason why I oppose anti-spam fascists (a name I give them for their authoritarian tendancies) more than spammers is because I know how to handle spammers, and virii for that matter. It is called the delete key, or the 'd' key when I'm using mutt.
Then how do you deal with the problem? Filtering email at the personal level is one way to do so. Personally, I prefer to do so manually because I don't believe that artificial intelligence is here today. While I don't agree with automatic filtering, because of false positives, I certainly find it more acceptable than having something forced upon me by an external agency (may that be for incoming email, or outgoing email). One thing which cannot be reiterated enough is to protect your email. While I do have a spam problem, part of the problem comes from an eight year old address (ie. the days before protecting my contact information became evident) and most of the rest is forwarded via a mailing list (which is too important to unsubscribe to). Does protecting your contact information work? Looking at some recent spam headers, I would say so. Except for the old address and the mailing list, the only unsolicited stuff I see are virii. I have also found protecting this information effective for my telephone.
