> It's great to have guarenteed lifetime employment for > software developers, but are we sure spam plus spam > supression is making the world a better place? This is a tremendous problem in firewall-land, where there's a continuing arms race that's moving firewall functionality further and further up the stack. Entities like port numbers and IP addresses are terrible descriptors of higher level policy, but on the other hand increasing use of encryption across firewall traversal points is rendering traffic content inspection useless (that's a good thing). On a third hand, service providers want to be able to concentrate service management function in their own networks, and you'll notice that at this upcoming meeting, in addition to the OPES working group, there are two BOF (pads and intersec) that are dealing with this issue to a greater or lesser extent. The tension between trying to provide those services in a way that's both secure and architecturally sound and trying to maintain some level of end-to-end integrity is a pretty serious problem for the IETF right now. I'd like to hope that any lessons we've learned from firewalls about bad design leading to escalation and ultimately failure in the face of technology short can be applied to spam protection, too. Melinda