Some people have been arguing that cancelling other peoples posts based on their own subjective views is a good thing. It would seem that they are arguing that it is a good thing because it saves bandwidth, and because it gives them satisfaction to silence unpopular minorities. Foo on that. It's censorship. If you didn't write it, you have no business cancelling it. NoCems are a good solution to mailing list and USENET groups spams. Then each person can take their pick of which posters article ratings to use, or can create their own rating service. For email spams (not talking about cancels here), I'd suggest attaching electronic payment to emails as a condition of delivery. A temporary fix for emails, or another approach, is to use hashcash. Hashcash is a token of CPU time. It proves that the sender has consumed a given number of seconds/minutes/hours CPU time. The receiver sets their software to reject mail (bounce with explanation, or put into potential spam folder) to squelch out spam. A description of hashcash, and an implementation can be found here: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/ Mail from known addresses (friends, mailing lists) would be marked as exempt from postage requirements. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`