Sender ID Rejected by IETF

Microsoft's plan to stop junk email has been rejected by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Besides failing to do anything to actually limit spam - the plan had some other problems. Mainly that Microsoft insisted on keeping some portions of the technology secret / proprietary - which kind of blows away the idea of it being an `open standard' of the kind the IETF would approve.

The idea behind sender ID is (soon to be `was') to track the actual sender of an email message via a registration system. This however it doesn't provide any sort of antispam filter or registry to track what senders are actually spammers. As a result the system in and of itself cannot stop spam mail. This comes on the heals of AOL deciding against using Sender ID - so this one looks pretty dead.

Bill Gates claimed that the spam problem would be solved within a few years a while back. I think he has about 18 months left to make good on this prediction. In the meantime email spam filters offer the best anti-spam protection.

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