on 8/15/2002 4:34 PM Fred Baker wrote: > the root problem is indeed social, but I don't think we need laws on > the books to provide technical work-arounds. If we want to, for > example, have white-list people (people who are subscribers to the > mailing list, or people who work for our company, or people to whom we > have sent the appropriate goober in the past so they can now present > it) present a credential and in our own instance of a mailer process > treat peers that don't present the credential differently (such as > r-e-a-l s-l-o-w-l-y), that doesn't require a law, it merely requires > the appropriate technical specification and implementation. We certainly don't need laws to do any of that. The laws are needed for when all of that fails to work, for the ten years between now and whenever critical mass is achieved, and for the simpler technologies which replace SMTP in the mainstream that start to have their own spam problems. ICQ has been whitelist-centric for years, and there is spam there too. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/