August 23rd, 2004
IETF puts SenderID on the fast track
Though the motivation for developing and adopting it has been to fight spam (and phishing), SenderID probably shouldn’t be thought of as an anti-spam standard. Rather, it’s an e-mail authentication standard that’s will enable the fight against spam. If you’re not up to speed on how e-mail authentication works, News.com’s Marguerite Reardon has a report that will catch you up on the basics. The big news is that the Internet Engineering Task Force (the standards setting body for the Internet and current overseer of SMTP — the Internet’s current e-mail standard) has fast-tracked its deliberations over a proposed e-mail authentication standard known as SenderID. Whether or not fast-tracking matters at this point may be worth debating. In advance of any ratification or deliberations by the IETF, many important members of the Internet’s e-mail ecosystem are already rallying behind it. Recently, Microsoft held a well-attended SenderID summit at its Redmond, WA campus.
