It is reported (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1000272.html) that Earthlink is about to institute a permission-based spam prevention system that will require the sender of an e-mail message to an Earthlink subscriber to confirm that the message is valid before it will be delivered. The article makes no mention of the implications, among others, for the managers of mailing lists. Presumably there will be some sort of whitelist system to enable Earthlink subscribers to authorise certain addresses, but we know that whitelists are a clumsy mechanism that don't work well. The spam-prevention system would have to be sophisticated, it would seem, to cope with mailing lists. Will it be triggered by the list address, or by individual posters' addresses, I wonder? In the latter case I can imagine an horrific scenario. Suppose that a list has 500 Earthlink subscribers; somebody posting to the list might then get 500 individual requests from the Earthlink spam system asking for validation. Can anybody put my mind at rest on this? -- Michael Quinion