IronPort Bonded Sender Program looks more like a protection racket than solid anti-spam technology

Wednesday, May 19, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: spam, anti-spam technology, Bonded Sender Program

https://www.naturalnews.com/001076.html

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The message sounds like a protection racket: pay us or your email might get caught in the spam filters at Hotmail and MSN. Yet the whole scheme does absolutely nothing to stop spammers from sending email in the first place, so it's not really a solution for stopping spam at all. As Ray Everett-Church (from the counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) says, the IronPort system is really just a way to let people buy their way into inboxes rather than getting customer permission. And that's bad news for everyone.

Legitimate email delivery needs to remain available to universities, non-profits, and organizations from poor countries who simply can't afford the fees demanded by IronPort. The Bonded Sender Program discriminates based on economic status: poor organizations can't afford the fees. In addition, the idea of one company controlling the whole system is undemocratic and goes against the free spirit of the Internet. We don't need another Network Solutions fiasco. For these reasons and many others, I believe the Bonded Sender Program is bad for the Internet: it is unfair, undemocratic, and ineffective in stopping spam. A much better solution is the puzzle solution proposed by Microsoft, which will very likely make the Bonded Sender Program obsolete.