Bill Gates announces end of spam

[lostcarpark]

Bill Gates has announced Caller ID for Email, a system which allows mail servers to check where a message actually came from. This could make email address spoofing a thing of the past, which would mean spammers could only spam from their own domain.

In theory this is a very good thing, except that a similar standard called Sender Policy Framework has been in development for some time and has the support of companies like AOL, who are already testing it on their email servers.

While I'm all for developing alternative technologies and letting the better one rise to the top, I don't see how Microsoft are helping the situation here. Caller-ID has some advantages over SPF, but it also has some problems, and could cause some DNS servers to choke. Microsoft may have some ideas that would improve SPF, but wouldn't it be better to join the SPF working group and have their ideas incorporated rather than developing a rival standard?

I can see three ways this could go:

1. One standard is quickly adopted and the other falls by the wayside.


2. Both standards are adopted leading to administrators having to install and maintain two pieces of software that do the same thing, and generating a lot more network traffic than necessary.


3. Both standards slug it out in a brutal and messy fight before administrators decide the situation is unworkable and give up on it.

The third outcome is the one we want to avoid at all costs.

Hopefully before it comes to that, Microsoft will see sense and begin working with SPF.

Having said all that, if all the technical issues can be worked out, we will be able to tell with some degree of certainty that an email came from the domain it says its from, which will make life a little bit easier.

Comments

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Sounds like VHS and Betamax all over again ...

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

I've been wondering why there was no caller id infrastructure. This is one of those few times where AOL's size will probably help.

It is the perfect example of what Microsoft (and Sun now) does. It takes a problem which people are solving or have already solved, and says "Use our standard cause we are bigger than you" and we are all forced into using it whether we want to or not.

Bollox.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Apparently Microsoft's standard has some advantages because it looks at the whole message, not just the headers, but it will likely cause DNS requests to exceed their normal 512 byte limit. A specification exists for how to do this, but as it hasn't been needed before, it's rarely been implemented.

One possibility is that MS will implement CallerID in Exchange, and stubbornly ignore other standards so everyone will be forced to support it because they need to talk to Exchange servers.