Welcome to the home of emailconfirmed.net To sign up for a free account, you need an invitation. We look forward to welcoming you to the family of email safe conscious users. We've created "spam hardened e-mail" in response to lots of clients complaining about too much spam. There's nothing truly revolutionary there, simply ALL the effective methods of spam suppression and control stacked up on one server, so incoming mail has a longer and tougher obstacle course to follow than usual. Most people think of one or two layers as "enough"; we didn't stop there. ...so that if you get an email from someone at that addr or if you send email to that addr it is "confirmed" to be ok. This is the really hard part... how do you do that while preserving the open, universal, and compatible nature of conventional e-mail? The short answer is that you don't. E-mail as we know it today is fundamentally insecure, and we have to do some fairly heavy re-enginerring and rethinking to get it to be inherently secure. I've completely eliminated undesired communications for some organizations, and I did it by using standard mail servers. What I added to servers and clients were layers of authentication that stopped ALL "outside" traffic and only allowed traffic from recognized cleints. For more security, we can add encryption, so anyone intercepting messages or header will only capture gibberish. This comes at a high price. Users maintain 2 seperate mail clients at times, a "public" email client and an "internal" client, which I deliver. The organization maintains traffic discipline by using the "internal" addresses for it's own transmissions, users can receive other mail another way. A more recent version of this system simply eliminates a "public" client -- who needs "public" email on a business workstation, anyway? Also, who needs the risk of contamination by email borne viruses, trojans, etc.? E-mail cries out for some form of authentication, but it has to be adopted by all email server operators for it to take off. I like Bill Gates' notion (as a thought experiment only) of charging a penny per email transmission, as it shows the degree of re-engineering that's nessesary.