> Email providers already tell people sending email when an address is real or not. You clicking the link would tell them you read your email. My bad for lack

> Email providers already tell people sending email when an address is real or not. You clicking the link would tell them you read your email. My bad for lack of clarity. I meant whether the address has a person reading it, making it a more valuable target, perhaps added to a commercially sold database. I don't know if or how much this happens. But it's obviously an available signal. > If your account has been in existence for long enough, you already get a lot of spam. True! I got 6000 spam a day at one point. Thankfully it went down to 1000 a day and has slowed since. > It just gets blocked or filtered. Unfortunately not so well. The vast majority is filtered, but that still leaves too much getting through (I got about 80 in the last 45 hours), and in conjunction with such a high level of false positives that good things go to the spam bucket, a problem both as a recipient and a sender. Gmail is not immune either; I often find critical false positives in my Gmail spam folder. Spam is not a solved problem, and the solutions are causing other problems. I don't have solutions, but I don't agree that it's "just" blocked or filtered. If only email was that reliable!