Online marketers offer new antispam initiative

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April 24, 2003 (IDG News Service) -- A consortium of online marketers called the E-mail Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) is planning to set up a registry-based system for transmitting e-mail, which it hopes will eradicate spam by holding senders accountable for the mail they send.
The organization's scheme, called Project Lumos, is intended to revamp the technical architecture through which e-mail is sent. The effort would ease the growing problem of unsolicited and unwanted e-mail, known as spam, which is irritating users and Internet service providers alike, the ESPC said in a statement yesterday.
Under Project Lumos, high-volume mail senders would need to undergo a certification process, and their performance would be monitored by the ESPC to ensure that they maintain best-use practices regarding unsolicited mail.
The Project Lumos blueprint contains the following four elements of accountability:

1. Certification to ascertain the mailer's identity in order to provide transparency.


2. Volume mail standards, including standardization of all sender information in the mail header and the use of an identifiable, trackable unsubscribe Web address.


3. Secure identity, an authentication process that provides secure proof of the sender's identity in the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol header.


4. Performance monitoring, a process that captures, monitors and reports performance data for all senders and mailers.

This approach will preserve legitimate e-mails that consumers have asked to receive, an area where Internet service provider-based antispam filters and blacklists have failed. In the fourth quarter of 2002, 15% of requested commercial e-mail wasn't delivered to consumers because it was wrongly filtered out by service provider systems, the ESPC said.
Since the wider industry has failed to come up with any answers to the growing spam problem, online marketers themselves are attempting to address the issue. The ESPC was formed in November 2002 by the Network Advertising Initiative, a group of 30 online marketers that includes Avenue A Inc., Blue Dolphin Group, Digital Impact Inc., DoubleClick Inc., E-centives Inc. and eLetra Corp.'s iMakeNews unit.
"E-mail is indeed a killer app and has been a major component in the productivity and efficiency gains of the digital economy," the ESPC said. "But those gains will be lost if e-mail becomes unreliable as a communications tool. Businesses will not be able to use e-mail if they cannot have a reasonable assurance that their messages will be delivered."
According to security vendor MessageLabs Ltd., 36.3% of all e-mail received by consumers in March was spam; the ESPC's estimate is 40%. Both organizations say the incidence of spam is rising sharply.

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