Microsoft to Provide Antispam Technology, Foster Email Standards - 26 Feb 2004

At the RSA Conference 2004 Internet security conference in SanFrancisco yesterday, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software ArchitectBill Gates outlined his company's plans to work with large emailpartners to eliminate spam. Gates said Microsoft will give thosepartners free technology that will emulate the caller ID functionalityin today's telephone systems and prevent spammers from hiding theiridentities and forwarding mail through anonymous sources. The plan,which involves backers such as Amazon.com, Brightmail, and Sendmailand calls for a global registry of legitimate Internet email sources,might have to compete with similar but less sophisticated initiativesin the works at Yahoo! and AOL. Microsoft correctly notes, however,that for the scheme to work, a large number of email providers mustadopt it.

Microsoft's antispam effort, the Coordinated Spam ReductionInitiative (CSRI), will include numerous policies and technologies thatthe company will use to curb the spam threat. Microsoft is working toestablish standards that will help legitimate email sendersdifferentiate themselves from spammers, developing new email filters,and working on a micropayment system that would make spam financiallyineffective. "Spam is our email customers' number-one complaint today,and Microsoft is innovating on many different fronts to eradicate it,"Gates said. "We believe that Caller ID for E-Mail and the CoordinatedSpam Reduction Initiative will help change the economic model forsending spam and put spammers out of business."

Ryan Hamlin, general manager for Microsoft's Anti-Spam Technologyand Strategy Group, describes caller ID as a mechanism that legitimatesenders of email can use to help ensure that spammers aren't abusingtheir Internet domains. "In a nutshell, caller ID involves two keysteps," he said. "One, senders of email publish the IP addresses oftheir outgoing mail servers in DNS in an email-policy document. Two,the email software at the receiving end of a message queries DNS forthe email policy and determines the 'purported responsible domain' ofthe message. This is done by comparing the information in DNS toensure it matches the information on the originating mail. We believethis technical solution gets at the root of the spam problem byhelping to confirm legitimate senders."

By this summer, Microsoft will roll out a beta version of Caller IDfor E-Mail in MSN Hotmail to test its effectiveness. Hotmail currentlyserves more than 150 million active email users and is the most-usedemail service on the planet. Microsoft will also work with partners toensure that the system is in place on as many email ISPs as possibleand help develop a compliance program. The company is also working onviable-identification alternatives for smaller email senders and saysit will continue to work on other antispam technologies, includingchallenge-response systems, machine learning, micropayments, andsafelists