Spammers quickly figured out how to make a mockery of Bayes based solutions. And who is still out there filtering spam using IP addresses & domain names? Spamha

Spammers quickly figured out how to make a mockery of Bayes based solutions. And who is still out there filtering spam using IP addresses & domain names? Spamhaus. For what it's worth, the SpamBayes plugin for MS Outlook has reliably trapped at least 99.9% of spam for me for several years now, with essentially no false positives at all (where false positives are defined as legitimate mail that bypasses the Unsure folder by receiving a spam score greater than 90%.) In practice, this is enough to keep my email account essentially spam-free despite the arrival of over 1,000 spam messages per day. On the other hand, blacklists accomplish nothing beyond interfering with my own legitimate outgoing email, just because somebody else with a Comcast account happens to be infected by a spam-spewing trojan. Gee, thanks, guys. As a result, I see blacklists the way some people see unions -- as defensive tools that may have been needed at one time, but that are now just unnecessary, parasitic middlemen.