[mkingston]

That's a brief statement which makes me think I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem obvious to me. Would you please expand on that?

[JoshTriplett]

I think it's a bad idea to lock out unattested clients, and as long as third-party clients are accepted, spam will always be sendable. If you're not doing end-to-end encryption, you can catch it at send time by having the server reject the client for sending spam. If you're doing end-to-end encryption, the only options are the sender or the recipient, and attempting to block it at the sender would require prohibiting interoperability.

[nl]

While I love the principle of accepting third-party clients, Apple clearly doesn't which make this argument fairly non-compelling for them.