Microsoft Steps Up Pressure To Adopt Spam-Fighting System

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By By KOMO Staff & News Services

Summary

The company wants e-mail senders to adopt its 'Sender ID' technology despite problems that could send up to 10 percent of legitimate messages to junk folders.

Story Published: Jun 22, 2005 at 11:57 PM PDT

Story Updated: Aug 31, 2006 at 1:59 AM PDT

Microsoft Steps Up Pressure To Adopt Spam-Fighting System
NEW YORK - Microsoft Corp. is stepping up the pressure on e-mail senders to adopt its "Sender ID" spam-fighting technology despite problems that could send up to 10 percent of legitimate messages to junk folders.

By the end of the year, Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN services will get more aggressive at rejecting mail sent through companies or service providers that do not register their domain names with the Sender ID system.

Sender ID seeks to cut down on junk e-mail by making it difficult for spammers to forge e-mail headers and addresses, a common technique for hiding their origins.

The system calls for Internet service providers, companies and other domain name holders to submit lists of their mail servers' unique numeric addresses. On the receiving end, software polls a database to verify that a message was actually processed by one of those servers.

Although only a quarter of e-mail messages now carry the proper Sender ID information, Microsoft believes it needs to begin requiring Sender ID to do a better job of cutting down on junk e-mail, said Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft's technology care and safety team.

"We have a solution that works for about 90 percent of mail today," Spiezle said Wednesday. He said Microsoft will continue to fine-tune its spam filters to account for the remaining cases.

Although the standard-setting Internet Engineering Task Force dissolved a working group on Sender ID in September, partly because of a dispute over Microsoft's claims to a patent, Microsoft and other companies were encouraged to continue pushing their technologies in the marketplace.

For the past six months, Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN services have been checking Sender ID records as one test in determining whether a message is junk.

On Wednesday, Microsoft began posting a warning for users on top of messages whose numeric addresses don't match those in Sender ID records, meaning the e-mail likely came through an unauthorized mail server and could be junk.

By the end of the year, Microsoft will treat as failures cases where Sender ID records don't exist at all, increasing the likelihood those messages would be considered junk.

The Direct Marketing Association, the trade group for e-mail and other marketers, lauded the move as "a necessary step to protect both corporate brands and consumer confidence," said Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president for government relations.

Use of such systems, the association said, could help protect legitimate marketers from unauthorized use of their brands online.

Indeed, Spiezle said Sender ID has helped reduce the number of legitimate messages mislabeled spam. E-mail that passes the Sender ID test is given a slight positive boost in the filtering test, and for borderline cases it is enough to push the message to the non-junk inbox, Spiezle said.

But Spiezle acknowledged lingering concerns, including the disruption of mail-forwarding services that colleges and companies offer to alumni and subscribers.

Sender ID also could break "send to a friend" features in which someone clicks on a Web link to pass an interesting item to someone else.

Spiezle said Microsoft is monitoring such cases.