Industry edging closer to beating scourge of spam
Industry edging closer to beating scourge of spam
Email security company IronPort Systems has announced a comprehensive plan to support Microsoft's Sender ID, which is designed to reduce the rising tide of spam email by helping the recipient to identify the sender and block unwanted messages.
IronPort's support will make Sender ID available to enterprises through email security appliances and reputation services, SenderBase and the Bonded Sender Program, helping accelerate adoption of the new standard.
The move is the culmination of collaboration between IronPort and Microsoft and Yahoo to help shape new sender authentication standards, such as Sender ID and Yahoo's Domain Keys, in an effort to increase the level of sender accountability in email. Sender ID integration is targeted for October 2004.
"While the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is a key strength for email, its very openness is also something of a shortcoming," said Michael Bosch, managing director of IronPort Systems Australia and New Zealand. "SMTP makes it too easy for spammers and other unscrupulous senders to hide their true identities by forging sender domain names and return addresses. This makes it almost impossible to trace them and bring them to account.
"Sender ID, however, reveals senders' true identities, thereby making it possible to set policies for the control of inbound emails that are based on senders' reputations," Bosch said.
"Our customers rely on us to identify new technologies to make their networks more secure and eliminate the complexity of deploying new standards," said Tom Gillis, senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing at IronPort Systems. "Sender ID significantly improves our ability to protect our customers from fraud, increases sender accountability and provides legitimate senders all over the Internet with tools to reliably identify themselves."
"Sender ID's success is contingent on broad industry participation and we need strong tools in place within the industry to help build this kind of authentication into the technology infrastructure," said Ryan Hamlin, General Manager of Microsoft's Safety Technology and Strategy Team. "IronPort has shown a strong commitment to partnering with the industry to help advance important initiatives to protect email as an essentialcommunications tool and their support of Sender ID to empower easy adoption for their customers will help further the industry's overall effort to fight spam and keep email safe."
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