An abrupt flaw with all of these ideas, is the fact that his has to be implimented EVERYWHERE (as I am sure most of you know). In theory, lets say America on a much more vast user base. None of the ISPs will adopt this technique, so now we have thousands of ISPs allowing all this malware smtp traffic. We have all of our users secured so malware has 1% chance of getting through. The flaw is, this lack of co-operation from the Americans result in pretty much only protecting ourselves, from ourselves .: we would still receive pretty much the exact amount of spam/virus traffic as before (minus the occasional hit locally) I would suggest, IMHO, that Microsoft (the source of a majority of the email+virus activity) do some sort of rate limiting on outgoing SMTP traffic on their OS. The thing is, sure spammers will "patch" and "hack" this and get around it, okay spam isn't THAT bad when comparing it against viruses and other malicious content being forwarded to mailboxes. But it would indeed make it harder for a less logical/intelligent virus to come along and spread like it usually does. This is only a thought, I haven't thought into it further then the bottom of the cup of the hot chocolate I had this morning. Here's hoping Microsoft have a noodle soup of code for networking that cannot be patched simply. My 2 cents. - Drew