This issues has relevance to nanog--the veiled encouragement to break-ins I see here does result into network operational problems, more than most of the spams do.
You misunderstand my point. I do NOT encourage breakins, mailbombing, SYN-flooding or any other kind of attacks as a solution to the SPAM problem. It's not a technical problem so technical solutions won't cut it.
You are correct that SPAM itself is not a technical problem. But, mail-relaying *is* a technical problem -- and regardless of the the legalities of UCE (aka SPAM), unauthorized use of other MTA's as relays *is* network abuse. This can be solved technically. Once the originating MTA must be the same network as the originator of the SPAM, it will be much easier to deal with the SPAM issue. Matt