The Federal Trade Commission today told Congress that, at the present time, a National Do Not Email Registry would fail to reduce the amount of spam consumers receive, might increase it, and could not be enforced effectively. In a report filed in response to a statutory mandate, the FTC also said that anti-spam efforts should focus on creating a robust e-mail authentication system that would prevent spammers from hiding their tracks and thereby evading Internet service providers’ anti-spam filters and law enforcement.
Full Report: The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003: National Do Not Email Registy: A Federal Trade Commission Report to Congress (June 2004)
MSNBC: Do Not Spam list won’t work, FTC says
With a recent uptick in the volume of spam, technical means will be needed to control the deluge, because normative and legal means alone are currently insufficient. If spammers can not be convinced to play by the rules, then the physics of the ecosystem need to be changed.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo are developing technical measures to stem the tide of spam. Wired News: Net Rivals Embrace to Fight Spam. Microsoft’s approach, known as Sender ID, would “require organizations to set up e-mail servers so that they automatically verify the domain from which e-mails were sent.” Yahoo’s DomainKeys system will verify that the “from” address in an e-mail is not faked by using cryptography.
Yahoo: DomainKeys: Proving and Protecting Email Sender Identity
DomainKeys is a technology proposal that can bring black and white back to this decision process by giving email providers a mechanism for verifying both the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent (i.e,. that they were not altered during transit). And, once the domain can be verified, it can be compared to the domain used by the sender in the From: field of the message to detect forgeries. If it’s a forgery, then it’s spam or fraud, and it can be dropped without impact to the user.
Yahoo hopes that the concept will become an Internet standard.
From Microsoft, Microsoft Is Committed to Help End the Spam Epidemic and a Q&A: Microsoft’s Anti-Spam Technology Roadmap.
