You might want to check out http://www.maawg.org - at least stateside,
I'm uncomfortable with two aspects of this group. First is it's anti-abuse stance. I would prefer to see a group that was focussed on services, i.e. providing the best email service possible to end-users. The second thing is the secrecy surrounding this group. It seems that they see themselves as some sort of private police force and I believe that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction from where we should be going. If there is too much crime in the streets, should we have citizen militias out there carrying guns? This seems to be the approach that MAAWG is taking. Quite frankly, there is too much emotion involved in the email issue. Too many people who irrationally hate spam and are willing to take extreme measures as a result. I do not believe that there is a spam problem at all. We merely have a creaky old email architecture built tacked together out of sticks and glue. From a distance, it looks impressive, but it suffers from many weaknesses which vandals, and now criminals, can exploit. I know that if we fix the internet email services architecture, then the bad guys will just miraculously disappear. It's like tearing down a drafty, leaky old building and putting up an airtight, insulated building on the same site. I once knew a guy who built a massive greenhouse out of 1" by 2" strips of scrap would from a sawmill. It was sticker wood for those from the Northwest. You could only get maybe 3 feet of useful length before there was a knot or it was warped too badly. He nailed these together to make 2 x 6 's and bigger beams. He build walls, 4 feet high all around, 40 feet wide and 200 feet long. Then he pieced together arches to hold the polyethylene sheeting. Inside he built raised beds of wood and two stories of lattice shelving above them. The beds were 3 feet wide arranged in aisled on either side of a central aisle. He did all this with a saw, thousands of nails, and these thin strips of wood. It worked for a few months, and grew some great early strawberries. He had it filled with tomato and melon vines just beginning to bloom when it started to tilt. Fact is, this structure had too many weaknesses. Insect pests crawled in through the cracks. Warm air escaped through the cracks. Moisture condensed in the cracks causing mold and rot to begin, and the wood to swell and warp in interesting ways. There were too many weaknesses, too many points at which it could be attacked by the elements. So, only 5 months after he began to build it in early March, I helped him set fire to the dangerous structure on a rainy July morning. It was the safest and cheapest way to dismantle the building which, let's face it, had no scrap value. The local fire department agreed that it was best done before the summer heat parched the landscape. And that was that. The Internet's current email architecture isn't quite as bad as the greenhouse. There are many bits that can be salvaged, but the salvage work requires coordinated effort and I do not see any organization in the world that is capable of stepping up to such a challenge outside of the ITU and the various national governments. Either we create an organization dedicated to providing a superior email service to end users, or we will all be implementing ITU email standards to comply with new legislation. --Michael Dillon