I have often considered this but feared all of the work needed to
get all of my friends set up with rules

FWIW, a program like MailWasher (http://www.mailwasher.net) is quite useful
(and free unless you want to make a donation to the writer). It
autodetects spam based on ORDB, Spamcop etc... databases, and you can set up
nice rules, friends lists, blacklists.

Best thing is you can do this without actually downloading the mails (it
only retrieves the headers).

You can then delete/bounce messages with one swift "Process" command, and
only download the mails you actually want to read.

Saves quite a bit of time.

That said, I can see both sides of the discussion. On estimate, about 50%
of all emails today are spam (that's billions of mails per day), and I had
to close a few older accounts because I got about 1.000 messages a week :-(

However, spam robots are concentrating less & less on newsgroups it seems,
one of the big no-no's now is to have your email address on your personal
website. That will create more spam than putting a usable address on
usenet.