Everyday I get a ton of email. Counting all the spam it's between 100 - 200 per day. I have never bought anything from a spammer, nor do I intend to in the future. I consider spammers a menace to the internet.
However, I was very interested to see that some people have real concerns about some current approaches for dealing with spam. Perhaps, better stated censoring suspected spammers (and open relays) is as bad as spam ethically. I really had never thought of it that way before. Here is John Gilmore's rant on the topic. John Gilmore is one of those unique individuals who has done a lot of interesting things like writing tar, starting EFF, working for Sun early on, etc.. He also has an interesting law suit regarding the freedom to travel in the new post-9/11 era. While I am not won over by his idea's about spam, I think his freedom to travel bit has a lot of merit.
I finally got around to installing SpamAssassin. What a fabulous bit of software that is. I am shocked at how well it works. I have had 1 spam not caught and no false positives today. Given the fact that the system is highly tuneable I should be able to make it serve all my filtering needs.
