It's particularly annoying because the spammers are not only causing trouble in their own right but also motivating an overreaction from major mail services in

It's particularly annoying because the spammers are not only causing trouble in their own right but also motivating an overreaction from major mail services in response. From the sending side, I have one business right now where our outgoing emails are apparently being blocked or even silently dropped by at least three ISPs spread across two different continents. We have never sent anything even remotely spammy in our entire trading history. We have all the usual shouldn't-be-needed-but-are extras like SPF properly configured. The sending mail server hasn't found its way onto any of the big blacklists as far as we can tell. And the mails being blocked are actually quite important things like password reset requests, emails with copies of documentation that we are legally required to send attached, or even replies to customers contacting us to ask where their password reset emails are when they've been requesting them! From the receiving side, I'm fed up with helping friends and family who are trying to work out why they aren't getting important messages, and with the ISPs who have screwed up their mail configuration or deliberately set up overly aggressive anti-spam policies but then have front-line support drones who just intone that you should check your junk mail folder as an instinctive reaction to any complaint about missing mail. I think that with email now effectively being both the effective root password to so many online accounts and the primary means of communication between a lot of people and organisations with genuine reasons to contact them, the medium of email needs the same kinds of legal safeguards that other essential means of communications like postal mail have enjoyed for a long time. I don't think it should be left to big name mail services or some random ISP to decide whether or not their users are going to receive legitimate emails any more. Blocking false positives is far more damaging than missing false negatives when it comes to spam, and the situation is out of control. It's time to regulate.