Hotmail To Junk Non-Sender-ID Mail

William Robinson writes "If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message. Somewhere after November, MSN and Hotmail will consider it as spam. Sender ID is a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail by ensuring the validity of the server from which the e-mail came. Some experts feel that 'Sender ID' is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings. Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard."

Comments

this one could be a problem for casual users

[yagu]

I've had my fun with e-mail spoofing, but now that e-mail is everywhere and used by almost everyone it's probably close to "time" for mechanisms and protocols that make e-mail more trustworthy and difficult to spoof (of course there are always going to be exceptions). But Microsoft contributes little by doing their own end run on the industry.

From the article:

Microsoft's unilateral move may hurt Internet users, he said. "Sender ID isn't widely deployed, meaning that average users are now at risk for having their legitimate e-mail tagged as spam when they send messages to Hotmail users."

Experts say one of the problems with Sender ID is that it doesn't work with e-mail forwarding services. The basic premise of Sender ID is to check if an e-mail that claims to be coming from a certain Internet domain is really being sent from the e-mail servers associated with that domain.

This opens up a huge can of worms... I don't quite get why Microsoft doesn't learn from past mistake^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hefforts. The unwashed masses (read, typical computer users) already deal daily with mind numbing quirky computer behavior (or lack of). For example (and I know I'm beating a dead horse (checkmate!)), Microsoft's morphing menus with chevrons, Microsoft's dumping of random files in random directories to mold their vision of a magical world (how many have been burned by the unexpected "thumbs.db" file in their picture folders?), and bizarro network settings (ever wonder why seemingly every computer in a home network gets configured with bridging?) -- these are just a few examples of things that confuse and irritate typical users, but the ripple effect is into the "support" community (that's us).

Rolling out this semi-baked quasi-standard e-mail device could wreak havoc with the e-mail users. I'm hoping whatever they do it's configured by default to not reject non-ID'ed e-mails. Regardless, unless and until there's a stronger and more mature standard, this one's trouble.

Re:Who uses hotmail?

[defkkon]

Unfortunately, yes.

There are a large number of people who haven't heard of Gmail. These are people who use the Internet to casually browse, and who check their email every other day. Hanging out in the geek community, its hard to believe people don't know their alternatives - but its true!

Many of these people view email as a very set-in-stone thing. Their friends and family all know their Hotmail address, and all their favourite news letters are delivered there. To them, its a huge pain in the arse to switch addresses. Its almost unthinkable.

Its these people that will happily put up with whatever Microsoft does to Hotmail, just so they don't have to bother with all this technical nonsense.

Home workers

[nagora]

So, how does this work for companies with large numbers of home-workers who are happily sending main aout throught their home ISP's with "spoofed" headers claiming, quite correctly, that their email comes from the company?

Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.

This is just another, on a thirty-year-long run, example of the fact that when it comes to IT, MS is clueless. Business methods and the law are their fortes.

TWW

Re:Stop using Hotmail

[Slipped_Disk]

As I understand it, you're wrong:
> You still have a trusted list that will redirect straight to the inbox.

According to the SenderID docs from Microsoft, your "trusted list" will NEVER BE CONSULTED -- the INBOUND SMTP SERVER will reject the message if there is no SPF record published, or if the originating mail server is not in the SPF record.

Ergo your filters never run - the message is never delivered to them because it is assumed that the message is spam.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:One little problem: MSN Messenger

[Pxtl]

Because ICQ is a crufty old monster. Most of the people I know who use ICQ haven't used the official client in years - the official ICQ client is the fugliest piece of software I've ever seen. I use Miranda for both MSN and ICQ, but most of my friends have migrated from ICQ to MSN.

I think this is what happened: ICQ took a strangle-hold of Canada. Backwards Americans missed the boat. Then, Mirabilis/AOL ran ICQ down the tubes by bloating it into a monstrous, crufty piece of crap. As a reaction, users migrated to the IM program that was already residing on their computer (and, at the time, launched automatically when you opened OE).