Why don't you set up an "Ask Brad" feature, either here or elsewhere.
The idea would be that instead of only you initiating threads in your
blog, i.e. blog entry, comments and responses, readers could ask for
your advice, and your answer could be handled like a normal blog entry,
i.e. spawn comments and responses etc.

Of course, you could screen the entries before posting the questions and/or
your responses, require registration for those asking questions etc.

The idea is that many readers of your blog have common interests and often
readers ask questions in the comments to your blog entries. The only difference
is that the readers (with your screening and approval) could start a new blog
thread.

Let me start (in this thread since it has to do with spam): Most people don't
have time to manually screen their spam. What do you recommend: using SpamAssassin
or something similar to mark messages as potential spam, so that the user can then
take whatever action he wants (delete them all, screen all by hand, apply additional
processing (semi)automatically (perhaps dependent on the score) but otherwise ACCEPTING
all spam messages, or, on the other hand, rejecting spam messages above a certain
spam threshold?

With some sort of automatic rejection (which I would like to implement for spams with
a score so high that I can be sure that I am not rejecting any non-spam messages), do
you recommend sending an email to the (perhaps forged) sender, saying that the message
could not be delivered because it is suspected of being spam? The reason I ask is that
my provider can let me have all incoming mail scanned by SpamAssassin before it is
delivered to me. (More precisely, all mail using a particular set of MX records. My port
25 is still open so that other email addresses are possbile which can be delivered bypassing
the spam screening.) Above a certain score set by him (5 SpamAssassin points at the moment),
it is tagged as spam. If I want, I can reject mail above a certain threshold. If this happens,
the (perhaps forged) sender will get an email saying that the mail couldn't be delivered because
it is suspected of being spam. I have no control over this.

I see two potential problems. One is backscatter spam. A spammer uses the addresses he wants
to spam to as the forged senders, sends to an address known to be screened for spam, and thus
has the spam assassin forward the message to his recipients. My provider doesn't seem worried
by this. Should I be worried, since my address might appear in the spam? That is, a spammer
sends me an email with your address as the sender. My provider sends a message to you (perhaps
including the original message) saying it is spam, and you see me as the original recipient and
suspect I might have something to do with the spam.) (If you do similar spam screening, then
one email might start a vicious circle and multiply until the systems are overloaded!) In other
words, is sending an email to the apparent sender a good idea (maybe the message was mistakenly
tagged etc)? (My provider should perhaps be concerned with all these informational emails and/or
with being tagged as a spam relay because of backscatter himself.)

The other problem would occur if, instead of sending information emails, the provider would send
some sort of error code during the SMTP dialog. This is OK for real spammers, but might be a problem
for people which forward email to me---they shouldn't get any error codes which indicate that they
might be sending spam. (For example, I moderate a newsgroup, and posts to the newsgroup go to another
site which emails them to the active moderators. If spam comes in, the relay site should not experience
any problems.)