Industry News
Spam has become so pervasive on our home and work computers, despite government’s efforts to curtail it. The CAN-SPAM Act hasn’t been the cure-all that everyone hoped it would be. The worst violators found ways around the law, while those of us who are legitimate are trying hard to conform to the legislation. Some companies have cut way back on sending bulk e-mails to reduce any possible infraction.
The common belief among the top e-mail service providers is that a combination of legislation, technology, education, and self-regulation will be the way to combat spam. Some predict that it would do away with spam entirely.
Here are some of the technology ideas for winning the war on spam:
Sender ID is a way to authenticate that each e-mail comes from the domain that it claims it does, blocking e-mail forgeries and fake addresses.
A puzzle solution being promoted by MicroSoft would require all outbound e-mail to submit to 10 seconds of calculations to be authenticated. Those of us who send out thousands or even tens of thousands of e-mails at a time would not be adversely affected. However spammers who routinely send out tens of millions of e-mails a day couldn’t afford the time or the cost that an extra 10 seconds of puzzle solving would entail. Hence, spam is greatly curtailed.
Content-based filters that would sift out certain words such as "free" and "money-back guarantee", and others that spammers frequently use. The danger here is that legitimate e-mailers could possibly be filtered out as well.
Challenge-response system requiring a response to the recipient’s challenge that a real person is on the other end of the e-mail. This may cut down on legitimate bulk e-mail as well, but would certainly impact the amount of true spam.
DomainKeys, an anti-spam software application being developed by Yahoo uses a combination of public and private “keys” to authenticate a sender’s domain, cutting down on fake e-mail addresses.
Reverse DNS matches an IP address correctly to a domain name, instead of the reverse. This is another way to authenticate e-mail addresses.
New technology is being proposed constantly, although there will probably be only one industry standard that will emerge. Hopefully soon, so that we can all have a reasonable amount of e-mail in our in-boxes and be fairly certain that all of those are legitimate.
© Copyright 2004 MDF Systems
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