Four Large ISPs Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam
The New York Times reports: "Last month, Microsoft agreed to merge its proposal, called Caller ID, with another, called Sender Policy Framework, or S.P.F., backed by America Online and EarthLink. The new name of the combined standard is Sender ID.

Yahoo had continued to support a very different approach, called Domain Keys, that is more technically powerful but would take longer to carry out."

Everyone except the Spammers themselves I suppose is tired of the flood of spam that besieges us daily. With this near agreement between rivals we may as well get used to some new terms like Sender ID and Domain Keys because they are likely to be prominent in our future vocabulary.

And as welcomed as a decrease in the volume of Spam would be, I predict that many of us will experience the unintended consequences of this well-intentioned effort to resolve the problem. For instance, I suspect that some of us are going to find that our legitimate mail is blocked, filtered or otherwise disposed of by some of these schemes, just as current Spam blocking programs sometimes falsely classify legitimate mail as Spam.

Most users of Spam blockers seem to want to "set it and forget it" and when they fail to review the messages classified as Spam by their Spam blocking program, they place too much trust in automation. As good as those programs are, they sometimes fail to identify something as Spam or falsely identify legitimate mail as Spam and therefore they must be supervised closely.

It is simply a fact of life that if you are going to connect to the Internet you are going to have to take an active role in stopping the influx of unwanted and unsolicited commercial email and the intrusion and takeover of your system by viruses and trojans installed by the criminal element in the online world. Just as you must lock your car and your home each day when you leave them, so you must lock your connection to the world at large through the Internet. The "always on" connection is an "always vulnerable" open invitation to whomever would invade to try their hand. A valuable resource in first discovering your vulnerability and then learning how to address it is Steve Gibson's ShieldsUp! site. He provides this description of it: The Internet's quickest, most popular, reliable and trusted, free Internet security checkup and information service. And now in its Port Authority Edition, it's also the most powerful and complete. Check your system here, and begin learning about using the Internet safely.
- posted by Perry @ 6:24 AM