Microsoft Releases Patent on SenderID

wayne writes "Microsoft has now put the SenderID patents under the OSP. The Open Specification Promise was discussed on slashdot before in conjunction with web services and it is good to see that they are opening up even more. There are still technical problems with SenderID compared with SPF and, of course, SPF isn't problem free. Still, over the last year, the number of SPF records has more than doubled from around 1.7 million to 4.1 million, with rate of growth increased in the last 6 months."

Comments

Why the hell did Microsoft have to go and...

[Avillia]

...Make a new grading scale for suntan lotion? I mean, honestly, we've already got Sun Protection Factor, we don't need some retarded system like SenderID... Hell, we don't even need SPF, idiotic parents just can't think of their children and get the thick blue paste that WORKS instead of this new THE PURPLE FADES IN crap.

Honestly.

Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys

[bcrowell]

So now we have Sender ID, SPF, and DomainKeys.

AFAICT, they all aim to accomplish similar things. Unfortunately, there's no consensus on which to use, and that means that they're all basically useless. One of these mechanisms would only become useful if virtually everybody used it, because then people could refuse to accept e-mail that didn't use it. Gmail and yahoo both use DomainKeys, which suggests that it's something that can really be implemented successfully in the real world. Looking at the Wikipedia articles, Sender ID seems to have problems because it breaks preexisting standards (see "Standardization issues"). My impression is that a lot of people looked at DomainKeys and said, "oooh, scary, it uses crypto." But hey, this is 2006, not 1992. Strong crypto is everywhere. Is there any reason not to go ahead and standardize on DomainKeys?