As a followup to Steve Bellovin's note, to clarify several comments
people sent to the list, note that while AT&T's email folks decided not to take
this approach (actually they'd decided that before somebody goofed up and
sent the draft email anyway, sigh :-), it was never something that would have
affected inbound email from the Internet to AT&T customers
or outbound email from AT&T customers to the Internet.
This was strictly for inbound email to AT&T's corporate mail servers at att.com,
which were getting pounded with much more spam than usual.
We'd rather not lose mail to j.random.salesrep@att.com either,
but inbound mail is still slow even though they've cleaned up most of the mess.
Technically I guess this isn't operational (unless you're trying
to reach att.com email addresses), but if they'd done some of the things
that people thought that the message said they were going to do,
it would have been.
Bill Stewart
Usual-disclaimer: this is my opinion, not AT&T's official statements.