I do believe that hitting back is futile if action isn't taken on a huge scale. Many have tried and failed and the most effective system to date is blacklists.

The problem with spam is that much of it is generated by users who aren't even aware of it. Most of the users of the email accounts and servers get hacked and their accounts used to send large amounts of spam. In this sense simply reporting them to their isp's will stop the spam from that one user, but the spammer will just get another insecure server to spam from. So this method of stopping spam would be very ineffective unless the servers can be made secure along with all the other servers on the internet. Which would be impossible because users just don't care.

It's for this reason that I believe that isp's should have very strict policies to fight spam. They should encourage their users to secure their scripts and accounts with good password etc.

The other way being suggested in this thread is to stop supporting the products that make spam possible. To completely kill the spam email market. This as I'm sure you're aware would be extremely hard. It does start with the users of these products, who are in most cases also ignorant and won't really put in any effort to boycott these products.

What I'm basically saying is that battling spam would require a huge amount of effort. The boycotting idea will only work if you hit the company so hard that they start seeing a noticeable decrease in sales. If you target a large company you will have a very hard time doing so. I'm really not trying to be pessimistic about the whole idea, but I truly don't believe it's going to work.

I've never bought an item that was advertised in spam in my life and will continue doing so. Thinking about that a bit more, I've never seen a product advertised via spam on a shops shelves either.

The question is can we really hit back and hit back hard?