It seems to me that there are three distinct types of situations: (1) Mass unsolicited emails for "legitimate" conferences (i.e., scholarly conferences associated with established professional associations) (2) Mass unsolicited emails for fly-by-night for-profit conferences (i.e., the conferences themselves occur, but they are evidently run for commercial rather than scholarly purposes, often by mysterious groups with no apparent connection to established academic organizations) (3) Mass unsolicited emails for non-existent conferences (i.e., pure scams in which the supposed conference does not even take place). There's obviously a lot of grey area between the first and second categories. And, as much as we might find objectionable about the second category, it's obviously very distinct from the third category. Mark -- Mark Warschauer Associate Professor, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Informatics University of California, Irvine tel: (949) 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 markw@uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw