Hello again.

First, let me state that I have nothing against Americans. Some of my best friends are, indeed, Americans, and in general, just because the plane got highjacked, you don't have to hate the passengers. Or even the cabin crew.
Now, if you are an American, I have a warning for you. Not because someone is following everything you do on the Net or snooping on your harddisk, or that there are crucial parts of your anatomy needing improvement, but because your country is in danger of become the Rumania of the email world.
Spam? Yes, Spam.

Some providers are already banning mail coming from China, Korea or Rumania - countries with a deadly cocktail of low incomes, jobless IT-students and a problematic or backward law system. That is, even more backward than where you and I am living. Rumania has gained notority for i's online-scams. It might have escaped your attention, for the Bukarest crackers have become wise to their reputation abroad and try to pass themselves of as Germans, Poles or what not.
Guess where more than 90 percent of the junkmail on my mailserver comes from? Oh, I hear you say, but the rest of the world can't do without the U.S. of A, can it? No, we can't, but we can do without your email. Already the default junkfilter I got with my spamkiller kills anything coming from Hotmail and Yahoo by default. Hotmail and Yahoo are on the .com bit of the internet, that is at least theoretically supposed to be for Americans and American companies. It may be just the shape of what's to come.
I think may well be technically feasible to check upon the addresses or IPs a mail is really coming from. If we can't now, we will be able later, for we'll have to be able. Even if it means redesigning the internet substructure. It's either that, or email will become something like Usenet - a brilliant idea, but ruined into oblivion by mindless junk, in name of the First Amandement and Free Enterprise, hallelujah.
Perhaps some big companies will get a whitelisting - no need to name the usual suspects - and for the rest it might well be adios muchachos. So, a 'Ban America' filter on email in the rest of the world might not so farfetched as it seems.
All this anger and frustration must have something to do with the latest laws coming from Capitol Hill, I hear you say. Well, you're right. I don't have to tell the people clever enough to log in to Wincustomize or JoeUser what an utter piece of nonsense an Opt-Out legislation is. It becomes even worse when you realise that this fabulous opt-out register in Washington is probably not going to register foreign addresses. They'll be busy enough with the .com, org. and .net ones. Possibly it will even go against international law, and even if they'd include foreign domain addresses, junkmailers will be cheerfully ignoring it - who is going to sue or punish them for damage they do abroad? And I haven't even begun about the fact that if someone complains, all they'll have to say is 'Oops, my inbox was full, I didn't heeeeeeearrrrr youuuu.' Honestly, they're in the clear if their inbox is full. And I could go on and on...
I don't know what's driving the US Congres and Senate. Obviously they aren't reading their email themselves. (Although it might be an interesting idea to rerout any junk you get to whitehouse.gov and any other suitable govenrment address. At least, it would serve them right.)
But, if we don't know what is driving both Houses, it must be pretty obvious who is driving them: the people who fund their election budgets. That is, corporate America minus the guys trying to sell us the non-prescripted prescription drugs. And corporate America will rather see the Internet choke on junkmail, than be denied the chance to bother anyone without asking, as long as email hasn't gone down the drain totally.
So, we are going to check on twothousand mails when coming back from holiday and still lose some of the good ones anyway (it happened to me), while the US of A is going to be the email pariah of the world.