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Microsoft Submits Email Caller ID to the IETF
NetWizard writes "Following on the heels of Yahoo submitting DomainKeys, Microsoft decided to submit their "Caller ID" anti-spam proposal as a draft to the IETF. This proposal tries to tie in IP addresses to the domain of the sender just like SPF does. To make things even more interesting, looks like SPF and MSFT's Caller-ID proposals are merging. On a related note, Yahoo submitted an IPR disclosure for DomainKeys to the IETF."
When you run an email system that handles more email than hotmail and msn.com combined, then you can submit your own draft (get in line behind Yahoo and AOL).
I know that I'm just being stupid here but some history:
When callerID was invented, the phone companies were making money on two fronts: first, they charged consumers for the service (which eventually became free) and they charged telemarketters for an "Unknown" callerID listing. Money on two fronts.
It doesn't surprise me that Microsoft is behind this latest version of callerID for email. I'm sure that there's money in it for them somewhere.
Just kidding.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
What we really need is a solution that is completely non-proprietary. A solution that no one company has any ability to control.
... )?
Can you imagine what the network would be like today if Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) had patents that allowed them absolute control over any of the common protocols (telnet, ftp, http, smtp, pop3, imap,
Either in terms of money or market share?
They would not be doing it if it did not help them in one or both of those areas (and directly as opposed to indirectly, if at all possible)
Microsoft is not a charity. Even when they do give money to charity, they have reasons that have nothing to do with simple kindness.
You're wrong. Sometimes they do things just because.
However, in this instance, they have MSN, Hotmail and Outlook. It'd be nice to have all of those services and apps spam free - it'd make their customers (who are complaining loudly about spam to them) happy.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
oh, I don't now, maybe is savings from not paying for spamer's bandwidth?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Lots of industry folks (MSFT, Dell, etc) have been reporting lately that a significant portion of their service calls come from either spam or spyware.
Cutting service costs will definitely help the bottom line.
If they solve the spam problem, what a huge PR boost for a company often accused to be overly agressive (Mike Rowe?). With Longhorn ever farther off, and SP2 for XP just meat thrown to ravenous dogs, they could use some positive press.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
Microsoft cares about spam for a reason: Microsoft owns Hotmail. Any technology that helps get rid of spam increases the value and usefulness of e-mail overall. And if everyone uses e-mail more, then that includes Hotmail users. (If Hotmail can take advantage of some of these technologies before its competitors, then that doesn't hurt either.)
This isn't the only thing Microsoft is doing to combat spam. They have a number of PhD's working on the problem at MSR. For the web page of just one of them, see the following:
http://research.microsoft.com/~joshuago/
So relax! Microsoft realizes that improving the computing experience of their users is in their best interest. Fighting spam is just one way to do that.
Instead of domains having to publish outgoing dns servers and update on continuous basis, why not just use digital signatures.
Let us say I am a small businessman and have a domain registered dsfkghsdfk.com. which is hosted by some well known firm hosting.com. The email that I send will contain hosting.com's digital signature (since I am a small businessman and I don't have certificate and public key). Now the recipient will see
From user@dsfkghsdfk.com
X-authenticated-by: hosting.com
The recipient email system can decide whether to consider this as a spam or not.
All mail gateway, relay, smtp server and everything in between need not be changed.
I say let them do whatever they want.
If nothing else it will encourage us to come up with our own standard that's open and better.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Doesn't Microsoft hold a patent on their 'Caller ID for email' specification? Are they dedicating the patent as part of their submission of this spec to the IETF?
Or is this Microsoft's attempt to not-so-subtly obtain a lock-in on email?
This question must be VERY CLEARLY answered before anyone moves forward.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
1. being able to filter out the bulk of incoming spam saves bandwidth, which costs money
2. potentially, they could offer this as a paid service
3. less abuse emails to wade through, meaning less support costs
4. Exchange Server upgrades to support this
etc. etc. The list goes on. Spam costs *everybody* money. Filtering it costs money. The ones that slip through cost money. Any way to reduce the amount of spam will directly add to Microsoft's bottom line even if you remove all revenue-generating aspects.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Say it with me:
"SPF/Caller ID is not a 100% a spam prevention mechanism."
_ALL_ these two services do is verify that the E-mail in question is actually coming from the domain it claims it is. No more mails coming from a Chinese open relay that claim to be from Yahoo, and hence, no false bounces back to innocent sources.
If a spammer fires up a domain, publishes SPF records, and begins spamming away, you can pretty assuredly block that domain from your mail servers without worrying about stomping on anyone else. Plus the fact that a spammer will have to register a domain specifically to spam, and registrars are getting sticky about having legit contact information for domains, you now have an actual entity to track. If they steal a CC number to register the domain, they're committing a crime, etc.
It's not, by itself, going to stop spam. No one technology will. Use the right ones in combination and you can get your spam rate to practically zero with no false positives.
> Microsoft has not sued over Mono. As far as I can see, they're not going to.
I read that before. Back when FSF was urging everyone to avoid LZW compression (used by "compress" and "gif"), because it was patented by Unisys. FSF even introduced their own patent free "gzip" utility, and zlib library to be used in other apllications (unusually for FSF, even proprietary ones).
There were also people harrasing the FSF for that, claiming they were fanatics creating unnecessarty disruptions (compress was the de-facto standard), and refering to low-ranging Unisys people the think had said they were only interested in LZW build into hardware like modems.
Of course, this changed once Unisys out of the blue started demanding royalities for gif creation tools.
The FSF demanding paperwork for contributions to their code is a similar case. Long time before the SCO case.
The sad thing is, when it comes to "intellectual property right", the paranoid tin-foil hats unfortunately tend to be right. And the "happy go lucky" people (like your argument: nothing bad has happened YET, so nothing bad will happen EVER) tend to get burned.