If it were about serving the customer
When AOL went to court to sue a spammer, AOL reported 8 million spam complaints from their subscribers. SPAM's multi $M cost to AOL, now in precarious financial situation vs the bubble time, is on the management, legal, financial radar. They and MSN (went with Brighmail) of course want to retain $$subscribers. How could you think otherwise?
Being a big company, they are also a big litigation $$target (small, medium ISPs aren't), so they have to be extra careful about blocking. They have been sued for losses due to mail non-delivery.
It's so easy to bitch and whine about AOL, but what would you do with SPAM at the scale of 30 million mail accounts and 8 million spam complaints?
Your justifiably beloved small-scale content-scanners like Declude and Sniffer would melt down in a minute trying to content-scan 100's of GB/day. Content-scanning is just not an option at the scale, so you would fall back on the much more efficient envelope-rejection and IP blocking.
You can see that MSN employed Brightmail, and then a few weeks later starting widespread blocking of networks (I bet it was because the Brightmail content-scanning couldn't keep up with MSN volumes, or they knew they could greatly obviate the burden on content-scanning by network blocking).
Len
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