Here's a little idea that I'll throw out to the sharks. You've probably heard of people who alter their name/address slightly when applying for credit cards, etc., so that they know when their name has been sold on a list, and by whom. Well I say, "why not with email?" Consider a hack to sendmail (or whatever MDA you have) which attempts to locate the email address given in a list of distributed email addresses. For example, vax01.na put on web page vaxu53lr sent to correspondent foo@bar.com vaxbl15. put on business cards etc. Where crypto comes in: You could actually have the tagged field be the encoded encryption of the data on the right. You'd still probably want a list to weed out bogus addresses that decrypt to nonsense. Or you could use encryption to embed a tag marking it as "good" -- a checksum, fingerprint, signature, whatever. With an adequate MUA, you could even have it pull up the associated description with the email as an X-source field or something. I may not have time to implement this, which is why I threw it out here. If you do implement it, be nice and put my email/web ptr somewhere in the credits. And send me a copy; I hate junk email. CC me in your comments; this list is too voluminous. Sorry about the long sig but the quote is appropriate. -- VaX#n8 | http://www.paranoia.com/~vax | League of Non-aligned Wizards ``In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way around the place. A few hacks can make a lot of difference in this situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.'' -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash