It's very difficult to draw a line between "legitimate" questions/uses for mass-mailing (broadcast addresses for work networks, mailing lists and sign-up newscasts, etc.) and those that are going to be used only for spamming.

Taking a very extreme viewpoint, the ultimate question that this can lead to is relatively simple: should we provide help for e-mail related solutions to problems at all? If we do, where should the line for legitimate, non-spam-oriented, questions be drawn? If not, again, where should the line be drawn?

I do think that it's a sorry state of affairs that internet spam has reached the level that it has, and I think that any direct steps that we as a community can take to stop the expansion of spam from help that we provide should be taken. I don't think that it's a simple issue, though - it's a very grey area at the best of times - and there's no right or wrong answer, in my opinion.

Something that does interest me, though, is that while we seem to see an increase in people asking for help about spam scripts, we don't seem to see the same increase in people asking for help with scripts that filter out spam - so maybe the situation isn't as bad as it seems.

Long-term, however, I'd say that there's very little that can be done about the problem - either here or globally - and it's something we have to simply put up with, and consider the relevant nodes.

-- Foxcub