When the cure is worse than the solution...

Eugeune Volokh is not happy about spam blocking that involves whitelists that he is not a member of.

I had a similar experience with an ebay buyer a few months ago who I sold a wireless router to. He had a whitelist-type spam blocking setup where you had to click on a link in his email or reply to his email to go through - except I couldn't get the link to show up and the emails bounced back. I think he finally emailed me.

I think spamblocking by IP addesses of known spammers, keyword filters, ect, can be good as long as it doesn't result in too many false positive (ie legitimite emails not getting through) Whitelists seem to complicated for anyone who ever has to get emails from someone they don't know (business owners, ebay buyers and sellers, people in jobs who ever have to deal with outside vendors/customers/users/ect).

Personally, I don't care about spam that much - a few clicks and it's gone. I understand the huge costs to networks (but they still bear much of these costs with whitelists - they still get the emails, and in systems like the one I tangled with, store that email for some length of time), but as a user, it's not a huge deal to me.