Filtering and blacklists have been around for some time, and while some headway has been made, vendor solutions may not be the answer for all users. So what can be done to change e-mail to wipe-out spam? It depends on who you talk to.
Yahoo launched its initiative, DomainKeys, last year. Working in conjunction with the Sendmail Corporation, the plan is to add a layer of authentication to e-mail. The approach will eliminate sender address spoofing, and make it very difficult for spammers to pretend to be someone they are not.
| "I think that e-mail is such a huge driver for the Internet. We used to talk about content being king, but communication is the key." |
However, the idea is to create a "framework within which comprehensive authorisation systems, reputations systems and their ilk can be developed".
Rachel Watt, senior producer at Yahoo's Sydney office, says changing the fundamentals of e-mail isn't workable, but tweaking it is.
"Some people believe that e-mail usage will decrease and instant messenger usage will increase because of spam," she says. "I think that e-mail is such a huge driver for the Internet. We used to talk about content being king, but communication is the key."
Microsoft plans to get in on the action as well. The company's exchange product manager in Australia, Andrew Cunningham, is optimistic about future SMTP standards stamping out spam.
| "E-mail being e-mail, it would be like making a mobile phone that won't talk to any other carrier besides your own. Anything we do has to converge and work with standards other than our own." |
The software giant will engineer its products to be compatible with whatever other authentication measures crop up, such as DomainKeys, he says. It's also planning to contribute its own authentication technique, known as e-mail caller-ID.
While some may doubt the company's insistence that it's eager to ensure full interoperability with its competitors' products, Cunningham is adamant that Microsoft's Exchange line of products will not try to lock out other efforts.
"E-mail being e-mail, it would be like making a mobile phone that won't talk to any other carrier besides your own. Anything we do has to converge and work with standards other than our own," he says. Let's not forget this is the company that recently announced a vision of charging for e-mail to eliminate spam, a plan that was never likely to garner much popular support. What does Cunningham have to say about it?
"It's one concept or one vision that may address the problem of spam," he says. "Charging for e-mail might be one way to do it, the way you pay for a phone-call. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered to make that a reality." Let's just hope one of the factors that winds up being considered is that it's a really lame idea.
Another company laud the benefits of some measured tweaking of SMTP is US-based IronPort. Its Australian chief Michael Bosch says its products will support Microsoft "caller-ID" for e-mail, the Pobox.com-developed Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, and Yahoo's DomainKeys. The company has also proposed its own changes. "We've proposed industry standards that will incorporate sender reputation into the e-mail," he says.
IronPort also maintains a "reputation index" of senders, collecting data from its mail analysers and probes across the globe. In a deal signed with Microsoft, the company is able to analyse Hotmail e-mails in an effort to gather intelligence.
If the buzz is anything to go by, this data could turn out to be very useful in the fight against spammers. Mason praises the company's efforts. "They've got some very useful information in their system [and] their Senderbase system is very interesting," he says.
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