mainsleazespam.com: Alternatives for Email Delivery, May 2004

Alternatives Proposed to Replace Current Email Model, Pros and Cons. April 2004.

Many Proposals, Little Agreement Yet, Especially Over Proposed Micropayments. Do you really want to have to pay Microsoft for every email you sent?

Alternative Email Models News Roundup

Click here for Prior Page of Alternative Proposals News.

To understand the folly and motives of Bill Gates and Verisign and others on fee based email, be sure to read
Alternatives to Current Email Technology, Pros and Cons:
March 2004 Commentary by Gordon Peterson on Microsoft Email Proposals
March 2004 Commentary by Rich Kulawiec on Microsoft Email Proposals

Anti-spam standard body dismantled
Row over Microsoft's Sender ID leads to disbanding of IETF working group
    The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has disbanded its anti-spam working group, MARID (MTA Authorization Records In DNS) working group, in part because of an intellectual-property row surrounding Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp.'s Sender ID proposal.
    The decision, announced in an e-mail to the group from co-area director Ted Hardie, means the end for the IETF's original plan to back a single standard for authenticating the senders of e-mail messages, a way of stemming the address forgery commonly exploited by junk e-mailers and other scam artists.
    Opinions finally began to coalesce around Microsoft's Sender ID proposal, a combination of the company's own Caller ID for Email and a separate technology called SPF. But many open-source groups criticized Microsoft's licensing terms and the company's vagueness about pending patents that could have given Microsoft a claim on Sender ID technology. In its current form, critics said, the proposal could have given Microsoft patent control over part of the Internet's basic infrastructure. Shortly after America Online (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. announced it wouldn't be supporting Sender ID, MARID finally rejected the proposal.
         Infoworld.com. September 23, 2004.

Standards Group Rejects Microsoft's E-Mail Authentication Plan
The Internet Engineering Task Force has nixed Microsoft's Sender ID proposal because of patent concerns.
    The Internet Engineering Task Force, an international standards organization, has rejected Microsoft's plan for E-mail authentication because of intellectual-property concerns. The group's reservations echo worries about licensing restrictions voiced last week by two open-source software groups.
    In a message sent Saturday to members of the Marid working group, which is responsible for dealing with E-mail-authorization issues in the Domain Name System, co-chair Andrew Newton summarized the task force's position that uncertainty about patents related to Microsoft's Sender ID proposal made the scheme unworkable.
    In May, Microsoft said it had combined its Caller ID for E-mail proposal with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), an E-mail-authentication plan authored by Meng Wong, co-founder and chief technology officer of Pobox.com. Renamed Sender ID, the specification is intended to curtail domain spoofing, which is commonly seen in phishing attacks.
         Information Week. September 14, 2004.

    Spammers Hijack Sender ID
    Microsoft's E-mail-filter technology, Sender ID, is unpopular with open-source advocates but popular with spammers, who are using it to bypass other filters.
    On the heels of the repudiation of Microsoft's Sender ID E-mail-authentication scheme last week by two major open-source software groups, spammers are doing the opposite: They're embracing the very standard intended to curb their abuses.
    According to E-mail security vendor MX Logic Inc., spammers are trying to make their messages appear more legitimate by adopting the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which recently became part of Microsoft's Sender ID proposal. To comply with Sender ID, companies publish a list of authorized E-mail servers for the domains they control. That list is used by those receiving E-mail to make sure the purported server of origin matches the one listed in the message header. Because spammers may forge header information to disguise the origin of their messages, their spam would fail this test.
         Information Week. September 9, 2004.

Microsoft's Attempt to Force Proprietary SPF They Patented on the Rest of World Begins to Flounder

	The Earthlink chief counsel has send mail to the Internet Mail 
	Consortium explaining that Earthlink will not deploy Sender-ID due to 
	questions concerning MS's licensing.
	
	http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg04258.html
	
	Also, the Debian project will not be deploying Sender-ID (which is not a 
	big surprise).
	
	List of organizations and companies who have so far stated that they 
	will not deploy Sender-ID:
	
	Apache
	Earthlink
	Debian
	
	From a thread in the imc.org archive called "Motion to abandon Sender 
	ID", this issue is likely to cause a rather major split between 
	proprietary and FOSS software authors and providers.  If Sender-ID is 
	set as a standard by the IETF there are some large companies that will 
	have to declare their support or lack of support for MS's Sender-ID 
	licensing.  The position that these companies take will upset either the 
	proprietary group or the FOSS group.  MS has been very adamant that it 
	will not change it's license, and as it stands, the MS license is 
	toatlly incompatible with the GPL and some other FOSS licenses.  The 
	license is likely to cause some issues for proprietary software 
	companies that compete with MS due to the licensing requirements to 
	disclose sensitive information to MS.

    eweek.com. May 28, 2004.
    Enterprises will be getting new tools to combat the intractable spam problem as e-mail server software developers and third-party software tools embrace efforts to authenticate e-mail senders at the gateway to block both spam and viruses.
         Spam Battle Moving to Authentication

    infoworld.dom. April 16, 2004.
    Paul Boutin, author of our cover story "Can e-mail be saved?", well remembers the mid-’90s, when many IT pros believed that putting everybody online would be disastrous for workplace productivity.
    “They were right,” he says, “but not for the reasons they thought.”
    The naysayers of that era envisioned time-frittering online diversions. They weren’t fretting about spam, which has effectively reduced e-mail to a massive time and productivity sink. When we approached Boutin to investigate solutions to the current e-mail logjam, we asked him to look beyond the conventional anti-spam fixes.
         Spam salvation. Six visionaries go to the drawing board to reinvent e-mail

    prnewswire.com. April 8, 2004.
    The Internet community must act now to eliminate spam. The seriousness of the spam problem goes far beyond the mere annoyance of flooded email inboxes and offensive messages: spam threatens the viability of email as a communications medium. The degree of pollution is so severe that regular users are finding it difficult to justify using email at all. As a result, the very utility of the Internet is downgraded. When it comes to spam, we are all harmed in terms of productivity.
         Eradicate Spam by Adopting Microsoft's Penny Black Anti-Spam Solution, Urges Email Marketing Industry Pioneer
        [Ed. Note: I totally disagree with the assertions of the person quoted in this press release, but it belongs under this heading nevertheless. The idea that I should have to pay Microsoft or anyone else a penny or whatever micropayment dreamed up to send and receive email on the Internet from servers I bought, own, and control, is actually pretty laughable. This proposal is not the solution. Progressively cutting off ISPs and nodes on the Internet that spam and now allowing them access to the Internet is the answer. Pure and simple. I do not believe I should be punished financially or operationally because of the criminal actions of spammer scum.]
         Same release carried on yahoo.com prenews.