Live and let spam is STUPID
Actually, the harder we pretend the spam isn't there, the more dangerous the spam becomes when it slips through. Let me construct an obvious little example based on adaptive filtering.
Adaptive spam filtering attempts to modify your spam filters to consider various factors such as what kinds of messages you have marked as spam. Now imagine someone send you a package via Fedex, but there are delays or questions, so you wind up exchanging some email with your correspondent and with Fedex, and just about this time, a spammer throws a Fedex phishing scam at you, it slides through into your inbox, and you click on the link. Poof. You're pwned.
The less spam you saw, the more dangerous this spam became.
Hey, if you had the tools, would you donate a bit of time and thought to hurting the spammers? You don't have to, but I would and I wouldn't mind that you benefited, too. If just a few people felt like I did, and if at least one of the major Web-based email services provided the anti-spammer weapons, then I can assure you we would completely outnumber the extremely small supply of suckers that are feeding the spammers.
We are NOT going to convert the spammers into decent human beings. However, we can disrupt their economic models and encourage them to climb under less visible rocks.
I really believe that, but apparently Microsoft can't see downstream where the peasants are, Google is too advanced into evil, and Yahoo is too busy going bankrupt. You would think that at least Yahoo would be desperate to restore some value to their only significant asset rather than being the leader in providing infrastructure support to the spammers...