What real effect on spam will this have?

[cd34]

If the zombie isn't listening for port 25, a connection refused will be granted almost immediately. No performance penalty whatsoever to the machine sending the spam.

If the cable/broadband providers start tarpitting or dropping inbound port 25 connections, your mail server will sit there waiting for an ACK for its SYN, and never get it -- thus, launching a mini-DOS on your own mailserver.

If the user had a firewall, and the provider didn't firewall, then they might see some alerts, but, the ones with the zombies probably aren't running firewall/up-to-date antivirus.

I doubt it will do much except sell product and boost IBM's bottom line for 'fighting' spam.