Originally published July 15 2005
Microsoft pushes spam-filtering technology
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Sender ID, a new program implemented by MSN and Hotmail, will tag all emails that do not verify the sender, and in an effort to decrease spam, Microsoft is revamping anti-spam tools like Sender ID and heavily marketing them to a spam-saturated culture.
Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday.
Critics say Sender ID, which includes technology developed by Microsoft, is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings.
"We think Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard," said Dave Rand, chief technologist for Internet content security at security software company Trend Micro.
The technology requires Internet service providers, companies and other Internet domain holders to publish so-called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to identify their mail servers.
Still, because some large e-mail senders such as AOL support Sender ID, about 30 percent of e-mail today carries Sender ID information, according to e-mail filtering company MessageLabs.
Criticism for the technology Sender ID has not been a success because it is not very highly regarded, said Ray Everett-Church, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and co-author of the book "Fighting Spam for Dummies."
"Sender ID isn't widely deployed, meaning that average users are now at risk for having their legitimate e-mail tagged as spam when they send messages to Hotmail users."
Experts say one of the problems with Sender ID is that it doesn't work with e-mail forwarding services.
"All domain holders and e-mail senders should be publishing SPF records and planning to do that now if they want to improve the legitimacy of their mail, plus protect their domain and consumers.
Turning on the filters at Hotmail and MSN will give e-mail senders a reason to adopt Sender ID, Spiezle said.
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