Receptional_Andy - 11:54 am on Nov 18, 2005 (gmt 0)

A very interesting point.

It also occured to me that probably all Google will do is check for a 200 response for that file request. So sites that deliver 200 responses to 404 errors (i've seen a few) can easily be 'hijacked' for the sitemaps statistics information.

I just tested this, and it does work...