Well mix, there's spam and there's spam
Yes, there's the Viagra and penis-enlargement stuff - real spam which my ISP immediately ditches (but of course a few real spams make it through their filters).
Then there's the semi-spam - newsletters from hardware or software people that I have dealt with, new products from surgical companies that I have bought stuff off in the past - all crap that I'm not interested in anymore.
This actually makes up the bulk of my inbox crap, but
there is no way that my ISP can guess that I don't actually want to read it.
If my ISP were to ditch everything that even smelled
faintly of spam then I'm pretty sure that a fair bit of mail that I
do want to read would go in the bin too and emailing me would be highly unreliable.
Complete server-side filtering cannot work unless the ISP has individual whitelists and blacklists for
every client and I don't know of one that does.
In the real world a utility (like Mailwasher) which downloads the message headers and allows one to delete them off the server before invoking the full email client is the only possible solution.
I hesitate to say it, but I sounds as though you do not see that it is near impossible to differentiate unwanted/uninteresting mail from wanted mail for an individual adressee.
Mac
