As a followup to Steve Bellovin's note, to clarify several comments people sent to the list, note that while AT&T's email folks decided not to take this approach (actually they'd decided that before somebody goofed up and sent the draft email anyway, sigh :-), it was never something that would have affected inbound email from the Internet to AT&T customers or outbound email from AT&T customers to the Internet. This was strictly for inbound email to AT&T's corporate mail servers at att.com, which were getting pounded with much more spam than usual. We'd rather not lose mail to j.random.salesrep@att.com either, but inbound mail is still slow even though they've cleaned up most of the mess. Technically I guess this isn't operational (unless you're trying to reach att.com email addresses), but if they'd done some of the things that people thought that the message said they were going to do, it would have been. Bill Stewart Usual-disclaimer: this is my opinion, not AT&T's official statements.