I liked this article so much I felt compelled to acknowledge once again just how ignorant people actually are about spam. Let's first divide the posts into groups. For the referenced article "Click Here"

1. The Questioned:  The person who thinks they should have a free email address and filtering should be Enterprise level and they should behave any way they want. Love the post from the person who said I get 1000’s of emails a day.  Personally if this is true your activity on the web is certainly questionable.

2. The Silly: “Is it legal, if I write an anti spam eraser that goes back to the source and simply removes the spam from their hard drive(s)?”

3. The Lost: “I have gone so far as to chase down the owners of blocks of addresses and emailed them about spammers and the email was returned.” Ever hear of spoofing? One can spoof a email address, IP address and even a MAC address. Ever hear of a zombie?

4. The Confused:  “I use a bounce program. Every spam email gets sent back ten times. It’s reduced my spam by at least 50% which is a real relief. The big problem now is bogus addresses. About 20% of my spam now comes from non-existent addresses.” You are as much the problem as the solution. You have assumed you have the target in the first place. You only aggravate the situation by thinking you are fighting back. If it were a real source on the bounce then they are now certain they have a good email address. After all you have made sure they know. Also a good read of the RFC’s concerning backscatter specifically will point out the error in your ways.

5. The Knowledgeable: “I’m an IT Director at a small hospital with a mature domain name (12 years old). SPAM accounts for over 99% of all e-mail handled by my system - and that’s a calculation, NOT an estimate. I spend about $12,000 per year managing SPAM.”  What can you say the person who wrote this has a firm grip of the magnitude of the problem, and the costs associated to good spam filtering.

6. The Diluted: People who believe something on their desktop is the solution. Please it is over! The best this can do is decide whether to keep it or trash it. The transaction is over when it reached the server. The point where you want to stop it is deciding whether to accept or delete it on the server. 

Any install of MailScanner on a server configured correctly can get the top 90% of spam. It is that number between 90% and 99.9% which is hard to reach. What is so amazing is some novice on a desktop seems to think they have the solution to a problem which is so complex there is simply no single answer to. There are millions of professionals fighting this problem every single day, yet they have the solution. Also they do not seem to understand that the person they are defending against are as good at their job.

Has anyone complained once to your postman that it should be their job to filter your mail? Have you stopped those stupid phone sales calls when you are at home trying to relax? With everything on the web even things that are free, people think it is a right to be protected in a world that is honestly quite dangerous. Your protection ended when you connected that cable directly to the web really. If you want to be really secure just unplug it.