> Unless, of course, you have a closed system everyone cooperates in; which is nothing like current email and cannot be rolled on gradually. I was writing abou

> Unless, of course, you have a closed system everyone cooperates in; which is nothing like current email and cannot be rolled on gradually. I was writing about NNTP, not SMTP—they are different. > You cannot wipe out spam without losing the decentralization element built into current protocols. NNTP was never decentralised like SMTP is. Each NNTP site had a very limited number of feeds, set up on a social basis. There was no concept that anyone could submit articles anywhere; rather, users submitted articles to their local site, which forwarded them on. In this environment, cutting bad feeds out would have worked (or at least, kept spam to a manageable level, which is all anyone really cares about).