The Evil Empire of anti-spam -- Microsoft's Project 1984

Microsoft is doing email users a huge disservice.   Essentially, it is trying to ram SenderID down the throats of the world's emailers, false positives be dammed.

This is repulsively stupid, and creepily totalitarian.  In essence, SenderID is identity papers for email senders.  Microsoft is saying that emailers without identity papers are nonpersons.  Or one could say that Microsoft is trying to set itself up as the Earthwide decision-maker about who on the planet is permitted to send email.  And they don't care how many innocent emailers are punished by a redirect to the Memory Hole; they just want to stop the guilty. 

Well, punishing an innocent emailer is a really really bad idea.  False positives on spam -- ANY material number of false positives -- make spam filters worse than useless.   Why?  Because they both interfere with communication (by delaying the delivery of legitimate email) and cause users to eventually review all the spam anyway (because they need to check their spam folders periodically).

Despite spammers best efforts to spoof them, content-based spam filters work really well.   The emai user community just has to take a deep breath, relax, and stop obsessing about the small number of types of spam that those filters can't catch.

Now, if the proposed rule at Hotmail were simply that certain limited KINDS of email wouldn't be let through without sender validation -- that I could buy into.   Email with no meaningful content except an image and/or attachment should be fair game for almost any kind of policing.  But I've never heard a proponent of SenderID or a similar system take such a wise and restrained approach.  No -- they want to fight global spam via the ultimate blacklist/whitelist system.   And that kind of megalomaniacal Manichaeism doesn't work any better in spam-fighting than it does in, say, Middle Eastern military strategy.