Just to put my unwelcome, OT 2 cents in... Spammers, individual spamming operations, send on the order of one billion emails per day, per each. Their business model depends on doing that. That's why we all see the same sort of spams over and over to the point one can make a joke about them (YOU JUST WON THE EUROLOTTERY!) and everyone knows what you're referring to, everyone. Anything which slows that down to a trickle -- what honest source needs to send a billion emails per day? -- would likely make the worst of the spamming business not worthwhile in general. (yeah yeah don't explain bots or snowshoeing to me, thanks.) The problem is that most proposals along those lines, somehow volume limiting or charging for email (say beyond 100K/day might do it, even 1M/day might do it) are met with instant hostility usually in the form of vague straw men about how something like that would have to work and rejection of that straw man. Which mostly just amounts to "I don't like volume limiting or charging schemes for email so here's a really dumb way it would have to work and why it's dumb". (please don't reply with your straw men interpretations of how it would have to work which you just thought up.) Or the vague "acceptance" argument, that could take 10 YEARS they've been saying for the past 20+ years. Or "spam is no longer a problem". Whatever. I didn't mean to start a discussion on the specifics. Just that in very broad terms those two, somehow rate-limiting or charging or both, probably are the only which might make sense in the abstract because they actually address the vast volume of email spammers need to send to stay in business. Spam has accomplished one thing while many fiddled uncomfortable with the most likely mitigations: It's raised the cost of managing public email services to the point that only someone like google/gmail can afford it w/o some subsidizing income stream, and even for google it's probably a cross-subsidized loss leader tho I really don't know. P.S. If you PERSONALLY don't ever want to see a spam message again in your inbox that's really easy: Hire A Secretary or Personal Assistant! -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*