Thanks to Peter Trei for that bit of history. In a message dated 5/7/98 10:26:48 AM Central Daylight Time, jim@mentat.com writes: << I just wrote and snipped a long disquisition on the history of spam starting with Clarence Thomas IV in 1993, having realized it's probably not relevant to your interests ... >> Actually, by the timing you describe, it would probably make it VERY relevant to my interests. I'd love to see it. << and old hat to everybody else. Suffice it to say that spam does require extra resources to process, both in hardware and time. We resent it because the end user is paying for it rather than the advertiser, so there is no natural limit to the amount of crap they can pour on us. >> But times have changed again. Now the users have unlimited access. BTW: As I understand it, the corporations were given free-speech rights with a bad Supreme Court decision back in the '20's, even though the constitution only grants rights to "people" and "citizens" (14th amendment) Stan