This week's powwow of e-mail heavyweights in Chicago returned the IT community's attention to the issue of e-mail message
authentication, but the messaging community has too little to show for a year's worth of work, some say.
Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and others used the second annual summit to highlight adoption of sender authentication technologies
and talk up their schemes for verifying e-mail senders and recipients. But some messaging experts complain that there are
still too many competing authentication schemes to prevent technical conflicts and guarantee widespread adoption of e-mail
authentication.
The second annual event, with the theme "Summit II -- Authentication & Reputation-Building Online Confidence" was intended
to highlight advances in the use of e-mail authentication technology after a year in which discussion and debate about it
has faded.
Microsoft used the conference to promote adoption of the Sender ID, its e-mail authentication architecture, and to introduce "Smart Network Data Services," spam reports generated by the company's
MSN and Windows Live services, and "MSN Postmaster Services" a new program to provide tools and best practice guidance for
ISPs to manage their e-mail infrastructures with MSN and Windows Live users.
Sender ID increased threefold from 7% in July 2005 to 21% among Fortune 500 companies, said Craig Spiezle, director of technology
care and safety at Microsoft.
Currently, about 32% of all e-mail sent is Sender ID-compliant, Spiezle said.
Many of the other companies and industry groups followed suit. The E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition -- formerly known
as the E-mail Service Provider Coalition -- issued a report showing "rapid adoption of authentication standards by 18 of the
nation's largest Internet Service Providers," including AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The company also issued a document providing
"guiding principles of e-mail reputation" and "a framework for public and private reputation services."
Enterprise messaging company StrongMail offered its own whitepaper "E-mail Authentication: The Time is Now" and a paper on
"The Do's and Don'ts of E-mail Authentication."
Despite the good cheer, the e-mail authentication landscape is still as hopelessly crowded as it was a year ago, said Meng
Wong, a messaging authentication expert who developed the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) standard, which later merged with
a competing Microsoft architecture called Caller ID to become part of the Sender ID framework.
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