IETF deals setback to Microsoft antispam effort

IDG News Service - An antispam technology proposed by Microsoft Corp. as a standard way of identifying the senders of e-mail messages suffered a blow last week when a group within the Internet Engineering Task Force sent it back to Microsoft for more work.
Members of the IETF's Mail Transfer Agent Authorization Records in Domain Name System working group voted last week not to proceed with the Sender ID standards proposal that Microsoft submitted in June. The group's members reached "a rough consensus" that questions about intellectual property claims made by Microsoft could torpedo deployment of the technology, according to a message posted to a discussion list for the group.
The vote by the working group, which is known informally as MARID, followed complaints by two top open-source software groups that said they wouldn't incorporate Sender ID into their products because Microsoft's terms for using the technology violate the provisions of their licenses.
In an e-mail statement, Microsoft said that MARID's vote "does not mean Sender ID has been rejected." The company said that it accepts MARID's plan to look for other mechanisms for checking whether the purported addresses used by senders have been spoofed.
"While we would have preferred a single technical mechanism as the standard, we believe this proposal to allow multiple scopes in the protocol is a reasonable approach to provide additional choice and flexibility," Microsoft said.
Sender ID was designed to help users identify spammers who are faking a message's originating address. The technology works partly by verifying source information contained in the message "envelope" against so-called sender policy framework (SPF) records that list approved e-mail servers.
Tens of thousands of Internet domains have published SPF records since Meng Weng Wong, who works at e-mail services vendor IC Group Inc. in Philadelphia, introduced the standard. In May, Microsoft and Meng agreed to create Sender ID by merging SPF with a Microsoft-developed Caller ID technology, which authenticates messages by checking information in the e-mail header.
Meng said he backs the IETF working group's decision because the patent threat was too big an unknown to simply pass over. He also said that he had repeatedly warned Microsoft about the patent issue.
The IETF could now find itself caught between the ideologically opposed Microsoft and open-source camps, Meng warned. "At end of day, we're trying to solve the spam problem together," he said. "If we can't do that because people have shortsighted vision, then that would be a real tragedy."