Anti-spam researchers are working on technologies designed to authenticate e-mail senders. Earlier this year, researchers predicted that solutions would be in place within months, but now those predictions appear overly optimistic, and researchers say it will take some time to produce tangible results.
One organization working on sender-authentication mechanism is a commercial alliance comprising the biggest consumer e-mail providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, America Online and Earthlink. Another organization, the Anti-Spam Research Group, is an organization of anti-spam researchers affiliated with the Internet's main technology standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force. And a small vendor, ICS, in Bohemia, New York, is selling its own, proprietary sender-authentication service.
The alliance, called the "big gorilla project" by ASRG members, formed in April to develop technology quicker than what they believe can come out of the research body. The alliance is proposing a method for authenticating an email sender, and is seeking support for its ideas from other vendors and industry experts.
"What we really want to do is make sure that the Internet community is in agreement that this is a good solution, and an appropriate solution," Miles Libbey, anti-spam product manager for Yahoo Mail, said. "Certainly, we don't want to willy-nilly go implement something and then force it down the industry's throat."
