Two Antispam Standards Merge

Two antispam proposals for Internet e-mail will merge under an agreement announced by their sponsors, Microsoft and Meng Wong, Chief Technical Officer of Pobox.com. Specifically, Microsoft’s Caller ID for E-mail will be merged with Wong’s Sender Policy Framework and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the main Internet standards body. The merger could speed standardization and deployment of the technology, which is crucial: companies will not want to turn on a new spam-filtering technology until their legitimate contacts also have deployed it.

Both Caller ID for E-mail and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) use the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) to verify e-mail server identities. This verification will prevent mail spoofing, whereby spammers evade filters by making their e-mail messages appear to originate from servers of legitimate organizations. In Microsoft’s proposal, verification requires three steps:

• Any organization wanting to send e-mail publishes the Internet