Perry, I believe that you are right. Due to spam, the usefulness of traditional email is starting to tend towards zero. It's really too bad, because email was really very useful, but we live in the real world. It is time, perhaps past time, to engage this issue technically as well as politically. None of us will like the solutions particularly well, but we can expect that if we do nothing, email will become completely useless. The solution will probably involve some centralization of email service, whether via ISPs or via corporate or campus mailers or via pay-for-service mailers or via ... . It will result in modest decreases in network efficiency for email (more round trips) and probably significantly increased protocol and management complexity. It may lead some to wonder whether a free Internet is really a totally good idea. Perhaps someone should convene a BOF on the subject at the next IETF, to get the project started. Bob Braden