Now let's come at it a different way. Do you think a retail service provider's time is better served maintaining a spam filter (and yes we will offer this as a service) on a daily basis or outsourcing that function and spending the time and effort getting the answers to the questions mentioned above? Or even better, addressing the deficiencies once they have the answers?

The theories under which many oppose this are: 1) They believe they are as likely or more likely to come up with a solution that's appropriate to their user community than you are. 2) Their understanding of your mission is not to provide capabilities that you can provide more easily, more scalably, etc. than your clients, but rather, to provide only services that it would be impossible or prohibitively expensive for any of them to provide. A correlary to #2 is that many of those would be pleased if you then provided those services in a method that still imposed technical hoops to jump through, so they could draw value out of their technical expertise instead of being trivialized as "retailers." Watch repair shops and shoemakers are retailers too -- but it is their technical skills that make them succeed as much as their marketing abilities. Some of your customers believe you are now skewing the balance in favor of marketing-focused resellers, and that that's both a change of focus and an inappropriate one.