I use a hotmail account for situations as you've described. Just the other day, I got a chilly little notice from them indicating that they were about to purge a few of my files because I had a lot of stuff there. I had, on that day, received 76 new emails, of which 72 were spam. 6 of those were spam with sender addresses within HOTMAIL. I figure they can't be doing much to discourage spamming if they go right ahead and forward what they obviously recognize as having counterfeited their own domain into the sender address. Hotmail has a destination, i.e. abuse(a)hotmail.com, to which you're encouraged to send your complaints, particularly in the form of uncommented forwarded spam, complete with headers. Now, I don't know that they DO anything, but you'll get this neat little reply from them, indicating that they do a bunch of stuff to discourage spamming via their facilities. They also tell you that some folks counterfeit their domain as a sender address, and how you can tell it's a counterfeit address, etc. What I think would help would be if the domain from which spam originated were blocked from sending email, particularly for the larger concerns whose income/existent is dependent on large volumes of mail, etc, THEY would take steps to prevent it. If it were simply made impossible to send the same message to more than one destination address, that would help, as would disallowing sending the same message twice. I'm not an expert, and I don't doubt that the spammers will find another way to do the same thing. What disturbs me is that they're chewing up bandwidth that we're all eventually going to have to pay for in one way or another, most probably by paying for internet bandwidth the way we pay for long distance phone service. Now, that would help get rid of those annoying little 800KB "greeting cards" of which those little old ladies like to send thousands a day, but the spammers would still chew up the bandwidth. Regulation is an ugly thing, and it's not likely that the sort of regulation that people in the US come up with will help anything. They're always trying to legislate good sense, particularly the folks living near the San Andreas fault, who are apparently the world leaders in this. It's not their domain alone, however. The type of regulation that will come about as a result is likely to be the sort of regulation that folks like Adrianna Huffington promote, i.e. don't let anybody put anything out on the internet just in case my little kid might stumble into something I don't want him/her to see. They are overreacting, aren't they? Gawd! I have never run into a nudie by accident, and, quite frankly, I can't even find decent ones when I want to! Nevertheless, it would be nice to watch the halftime show at the superbowl and see them take the 100 worst spammers and slowly dip them into a solder pot. <end of rant> Dick -----Original Message----- From: Christian Fandt &lt;cfandt(a)netsync.net&gt; To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers &lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt; Date: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 12:22 PM Subject: Re: Own Your Own Internet Store