Personally I think that spam will not go away with new laws. Certainly some laws could be enhanced to give them scope to cover spam type acts but ultimately the problem is with technology not law. Certain things should be made illegal. Ie, domain or email forging. If you don't have permission from the domain or email owner to use an email address the address owner should be able to sue/prosecute. However the problem really is technological. SMTP is too trusting. We need ways of verifying the authenticity of sender addresses and their sources. If methods like SPF were universally adopted and turned on by default much of the problem with spam would go away. People could still send spam. But they would have to do it via "legitimate" servers. Ie, ones they owned. It would then be a case of blocking those servers/networks that repeatedly offended. People will argue that they shouldn't need to block servers. People should just stop sending spam. This however is more problematic than you might think. The problem with spam is not that it is unsolicited or commercial or bulk but rather that it is unwanted. The problem however is that you don't know it is unwanted until you read it. For example, say someone was overtly generous and very rich (and perhaps slightly crazy). If they send 2 million email messages to randomly harvested addresses giving them information on how to get a $100 would this mail necessarily be unwanted by the recipients. In today's environment people would be highly suspicious of this email but for the sake of argument imagine that the offer was legit. Why should this behaviour be illegal? Similarly would it be illegal to send 2 million snail mail envelopes to randomly selected addresses with $100 stuffed into each? People would be falling over themselves to get on this mailing list. I believe all we need is good law regarding fraud, false advertising, pornography and commercial entity identification accompanied by good user driven technology that enables network administrators to lock the bad guys out. So, everyone should configure their mail server with SPF immediately! Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver.jones(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com