Managing Collateral Damage From Filtering
In military terms, Collateral Damage means "oops, we killed the wrong people", usually non-combatants.
In anti-spam terms, Collateral Damage is refusing legitimate, non-Spam E-mail or network traffic.
Unfortunately, the only effective ways to block Spam also block real, non-Spam E-mail. The percentages you are willing to put up with determine to a large extent how little Spam you will receive, as well as how much of a contribution you make to the larger anti-Spam effort.
When someone sending non-Spam E-mail through an Open Relay is blocked and complains, educate them about the Open Relay problem and point them or their E-mail system administrators to resources to get it fixed. This particular collateral damage is the only reason many people finally close their Open Relays. Since the problem is so trivial for the server admin to fix, it is important to inflict this collateral damage to get the admin to take notice of the problem.
When someone running a pet home mail server on a DSL connection can't send you E-mail, educate them about the problems of Botnet Spam. Point out that they can easily reach you by relaying through the ISPs mail server. People like this aren't generally open to these sorts of arguments, as they believe (sometimes corectly) that they can do a better job running their mail server than the ISP does with theirs. In this case suggest that if they require that sort of reliability that they might look at paying for a connection with a statically assigned TCP/IP address that won't normally be blocked by the consumer lists.
The important point in all cases is not to accuse the person involved of being a spammer, but to educate them as to the reasons you are blocking their mail, in an effort to get them to fix those reasons or find someone who can. Unless of course you are talking to a representative of the spammer or their uncooperative ISP, in which case they basically are the spammer.
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