(If you don't know what a BOFH is, you probably don't need to know, wouldn't dare do such things, and maybe even couldn't. No, I'm not going to explain. If you have enough of a clue to deserve to know, you can find out quite easily. No, I won't tell you how. Stop whining before I get out the clue-by-four!)
A proper BOFHly attitude can do wonders to deter spam. Mainly, do everything you can to hurt the mofos back... within the law. (Or at least in such a way that they can't pin it on you.) Sorry, no, not even the most antispam judge and jury will acquit you for storming even Benchmark Print Supply with a submachine gun, nor pingstorming adult-toys.com, nor calling Top Secrets' toll-free phone number over and over and over, especially since the bills for toll-free numbers usually show who called when, and caller-ID blocking does not affect them. (BTW, apropos of nothing <whistles innocently>, calls from payphones to toll-free numbers cost the spammer, er, receiver, an extra 35 cents per call.)
However, as instructed in my earlier article, Striking Back, you can get spammers shut down, especially since the spammer's ISP will believe a fellow sysadmin much more readily than they will believe a mere luser. Since a BOFH should have much better tools at his disposal (no, I don't mean your Leatherman in the sink!), it should be even easier. Don't just nuke the spam, sidetrack it into a "definite spam" queue, which you can drain later. It's amazing how much stress can be relieved by LARTing a spammer or five, even elsewhere. You can even have a simple program check whether any messages are duplicates of others, nuke the dupes, and log how many.
For more stress relief, a BOFH is in a much better position to cost spammers money by means of phone lines. Why? Because you can pull the "one spam, one phone call" routine in much larger quantity! Say some bozo spams five of your lusers, and includes an 800 number. Don't just call it once and say he spammed five of your lusers -- call it five times, complaining about each spam once! Better yet, do this but let the spam pass along to your lusers, and encourage them to call too. This can work wonderfully in a hierarchical system such as Fidonet: the gateway, the mailhub, the local hub, the sysop, and the end luser, EACH get to call about each spam! Of course, this can get rather labor intensive, but if you have good software and the proper hardware, you can automate it to a rather large extent. Just be sure to tell the spammer that the spam bounced to your attention because the address is invalid, lest they (as usual) take your complaint as validation of the address.
Other nastiness you can pull, much of which lusers can do too, include:
I have no real evidence, but I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason my own BBS, and my own email accounts elsewhere, receive so little spam, is that I have gained such a rep that many spammers know better than to fsck with me. If they had any brains at all, they would use the Boulder Pledge list, and addies harvested from nana* and the Monastery, as real remove-lists! (Again, if you don't know what nana* and the Monastery are, you probably don't need to, and probably aren't a BOFH anyway.)
To paraphrase our favorite genocidal maniac, "What luck for sysadmins that spammers do not think!"