> And there is in point of fact an entire police force tracking down > scam artists using the postal mail. It is rare for blatantly illegal scams to come through postal mail since in order to get bulk mail rates, the sender has to be identifiable and accountable. The bulk of my unwanted postal mail is actually somewhat relevant since it is for products and services that are sold in England or my district of London. But I get lots of email for products in Russia, Canada, China, Korea and the USA which I could not possibly buy. Analogies can only take you so far. I think the real lessons from postal mail come from a fairly abstract level. For instance, requiring more effort to send the mail means that there is less frivolous mail. Accountability of the sender reduces the volume of illegal or abusive mail to a trickle. In the email world we would likely use very different mechanisms to require some per-message effort by senders or to make senders more accountable. No doubt any such mechanisms would be subvertable but again, the lesson is that if it requires EFFORT to subvert the mechanism, then it does reduce the magnitude of the problem and that in itself may be sufficient to "solve" the problem. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf