The spock team just didn't think this one through. You have to ask youself, "So what if everybody does this?" If the answer is you will flood people with mail it's a bad business decision because you will get blowback.

Punish them forever? No. As long as they do a proper "Shit, sorry, we made a stupid mistake, we won't do it again" rather than a "We made no mistake, really" then I think people will forgive Spock and be interested again.

Just look at my math. I think most people have address books with 1,000 or so people. It just doesn't scale for any app to mail them all.