On Wed, 28 May 2003, Christian Huitema wrote: > There is an obvious issue with the protocol route: from a protocol point > of view, it is quite hard to distinguish unsolicited commercial e-mail, > which we would label spam, and unsolicited acceptable e-mail, which > could be more than welcome. I don't see where the commercial attribute has any significance. Unsolicited BULK is what I label spam. While I don't see the effort as useful, detecting bulk email is probably easier than any attempt to evaluate its purpose or (content beyond exceeding measures used to detect the BULK nature). Correct accurate labeling is a 2nd order solution which can be used to reduce the people time impact via filtering, but filtering doesn't eliminate resouce impacts such as consumption of scarce and/or costly link bandwidth. Protocol changes can deal with identification, authentication, trust relationships, interoperable labeling, payment exchange, ... None of these areas of new/improved protocols require any understanding of purpose or content. [Perhaps even protocol support for interoperable wrapping of end user spam nominations as documenation is collected and transfered about the network.] Dave Morris