Recent legislation to lessen spam has not had much impact. My e-mail box is still filling up with come-ons for viagra, college degrees, free software, and low-rate loans.
Many methods for ridding our e-mail system of spam have been proposed but none seemed likely to make a difference until now. Microsoft, Yahoo! and other industry partners are teaming up to introduce a way to authenticate e-mail. This would prevent spammers from hiding behind fraudulent e-mail addresses. Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates recently announced a system he called “Caller ID for E-Mail.” He touted this as the first element of Microsoft’s new Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative.
The Caller ID system would have e-mail senders publish the IP addresses of their outgoing mail servers inside the Domain Name System (DNS), which is the Internet service that translates alphabetical domain names into numeric IP addresses. On the receiving end, e-mail would be verified by comparing the address in the “from field” to the IP address. This could all be done seamlessly by software. If the two addresses didn’t match the e-mail would be declared invalid. This would prevent many of the tricks that spammers currently use to spread their spam. America Online is currently testing a similar “Sender Protected From” protocol and Yahoo!’s “DomainKeys” proposal also uses a comparable technology. All of these companies and many others seem to be committed to fighting spam and may be willing to back whichever technology works the best.
Because these technologies will verify addresses, they may prevent address forging and spoofing. They could also eliminate pfishing, a disturbing development in which an e-mail looks like it is from a reputable company when in fact, it is from a spammer or hacker who is trying to steal important user information. This will not, however, solve the problem of spammers hi-jacking computers of innocent users and using them to send out spam without the users knowledge. That is why Mr. Gates stressed that this was only the first part of an anti-spam effort. Let’s hope that it works and that other steps are taken to give us all e-mail without spam.
