Stephen, Monday, December 9, 2002, 9:52:26 AM, you wrote: Stephen> The devil is in determining what senders are authorized once we've Stephen> authenticated them. The concept of being "authorized" to send someone mail has good logic, but goes against established human communication practises for mail and telephone. (Filtering is common to both, but is different from "authorization".) Some time ago, Mike O'Dell put forward the idea of "accountable", in the sense of being able to reach back to the sender, to hold them accountable for their actions. The general idea behind pursuing simple authentication presumes that the really nasty spammers would not want to be identified. It's not clear how valid this presumption really would be. d/ -- Dave Crocker <mailto:dhc2@dcrocker.net> TribalWise <http://www.tribalwise.com> t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850