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Microsoft and Yahoo! Fight Spam - Sort Of
kyndig writes "In a Forbes article, Microsoft claims that 90% of email on the internet is spam. To fight this, Yahoo! has teamed with Cisco in developing DKIM, a signature based email authentication. Not to be outdone, Microsoft is proposing SenderID, which examines an email to see if it is coming from an authorized server. Earthlink's chief technology officer, Tripp Cox, goes on to examine the pro's and con's of each specification and provides practical application results." From the article: "Critics have accused Microsoft forcing SenderID on the industry without addressing questions about perceived shortcomings. The company drew fresh criticism recently when reports claimed that its Hotmail service would delete all messages without a valid SenderID record beginning in November. While AOL uses SPF, many e-mail systems do not. If Microsoft went through with this, for example, a significant portion of valid e-mails would never reach intended Hotmail recipients."
There is also Sender Policy Framework (http://spf.pobox.com/), this is very simular to SenderID but it has the majour advantage that its open source, agreed microsoft is trying to push SenderID down everybodys throats, I myself publish SPF on a number of domains and it does a good job. The more people that use SPF the more power it will have over SenderID.
If anyone had even bothered to read the linked article, they'd see that it said MS would "flag it as potential spam". They wouldn't just stop getting it.
Actually, what we need is a messaging protocol that isn't tied to some website.
Jabber anyone?
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
I was getting about 40 spam messages a day, before I implemented my new anti-spam e-mail server. Now I get about one or two... but SenderID only blocks about two messages a week. Much more effective are my set of 5 Blacklists, a URL Blacklist, and some simple rules. SenderID can stop fake from addresses, but the people sending the messages will just use servers that do not have SPF entry's, as all the servers will never implement it.