Originally published May 19 2004
IronPort Bonded Sender Program looks more like a protection racket than
solid anti-spam technology
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
With great fanfare and plenty of headlines, MSN and Hotmail have joined
the IronPort Bonded Sender Program, a scheme that requires companies to
post a bond before being allowed to send email. The program is rather
expensive to get into, putting it far out of the reach of legitimate
email marketers, small businesses and non-profits that don't have deep
pockets. The whole thing smacks of an inside job: IronPort's CEO is a
former employee of both Hotmail and MSN, for one thing. It also looks
more like a way to extract dollars from businesses rather than really
solve the spam problem: money posted by businesses who want to
participate goes directly to -- guess who? -- IronPort. 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.
Microsoft on Wednesday said MSN and Hotmail have joined anti-spam vendor
IronPort Systems Inc.'s Bonded Sender E-mail-accreditation program, a
so-called whitelist or allow-list service by which legitimate volume
senders of E-mail can ensure delivery of their messages.
"The significance here is that the industry is struggling to combat
spam, and this notion of considering the sender's reputation is starting
to become more commonplace," says Matt Cain, an analyst at IT research
firm Meta Group.
For Scott Richter, president of E-mail marking firm OptInRealBig.com and
the third-largest spammer in the world, according to a December lawsuit
filed by Microsoft and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer,
the announcement isn't particularly troubling.
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