More Microsoft -- the spam killer

Lots of news about/from Microsoft coming out of the Moscone Center in San Francisco (RSA) today. In addition to the post below, here's another piece from the Washington Post entitled, Microsoft to Launch Plan to Control Spam. Upshot: MS is launching a means to detect spam by validating the sender. In other words, rather than deal with spam as something to be filtered out for its content or unknown qualities, they propose to "filter" the spam based on validation of the sender's authenticity. In other words, if I don't know who you are, your mail doesn't get through. And, it proposes this based on a voluntary (??) registration of the sending IP addresses; corollary: without extensive PKI or similar technology. Hotmail is going to launch this very soon.

Verrrrry interrresting. The obvious loser is the "spoofer" trying to get around filters by pretending to be a known quantity -- at least until there's a new way around the solution. I could see this eventually migrating to a credential-based system that requires authentication of the actual sender with some form of digital id token (see MS/RSA announcement immediately below). But, this seems like a relatively painless way for the market to adopt the process.

Time will tell.

Posted by Grayson at February 25, 2004 01:36 PM