Erol's has had to upgrade their mail servers 3 times in the past 1.5 years, due in large part to the excessive amounts of junk email received en toto by Erol's customers. And since email servers aren't cheap, we've had to raise our prices, which means our customers are subsidizing advertising that they don't want. Furthermore, this applies across the board, so customers who have never received any junk email at all are still helping to defray the costs of the ones that do. Spammers are, in fact, the single largest threat to freedom of speech on this, the greatest two-way communications medium ever invented. That last lie has led to several divorces, several firings, and at least one suicide.
Lies have consequences.
The spammers do the hassling first. Everything else is a consequence of the spammers' disregard for the rights of users to not be subjected to unwanted messages at the recipient's expense. I payed lawyers big money to teach me that painful lesson.