I began to wonder if I was spamming . . .

since I posted this message to 3 different boards, so I decided against posting it further.

Then I downloaded ehotsheet. . .

Read on.
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I posted this in answer to a question posted on another board. The poster wanted to know if blocking spam by ISPs was pre-censorship, and whether the spam thing was over-hyped.
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The answer to both questions, IMHO, depends on "whose ox is being gored."

If you're a spammer, it's a bad thing.
If you're an ISP, it's an expensive thing.
If you're in business, it's a "bottom line" kind of situation.

I've been doing some digging today, and have learned that it's not so much "filtering," which might be construed (big stretch, BTW) as censorship, as "blocking."

There are service providers who do nothing to kick people off their networks who are open, known spammers. They get blocked.

There are providers who host people/businesses that sell spam tools - email harvesters, 'bots, etc. They get blocked.

There are entire countries where misconfigured or badly configured email servers allow spammers the world over to send mail, all the while protecting themselves from discovery. Most often blocked are China and Korea.

And there's another facet to the story of whose mail gets where:

I recently turned on the DNS checking option in Mailwasher, and was/am surprised at the number of legitimate ezines to which I subscribe that were shown as "origin blacklisted." And Mailwasher is configured (by default) to check only 3 Blacklists.

Unfortunately, it doesn't tell which list, so the reason for the listing can't be surmised.

Legitimate mailers might do well to send their messages to themselves first, and receive it with mailwasher to ascertain whether or not the service provider they are using is listed on one of the Blacklists.

This needs to be done only once for each service provider. Then, they can try to come to some solution with them.

(ehotsheet was marked blacklisted . . . I overrode that and put it on my 'friends' list.)