David M Williams
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 16:27
Opinion and Analysis
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Cast your mind back four years. Bill Gates was spruiking sender ID as the solution to spam, proposing extensions to the standard e-mail protocol. Nothing came of it. Does the new kid on the block have the goods?
Google Wave is the hot property of the week, and the heir apparent to today's 40-year old e-mail standard, encompassing mail and instant messaging and blogs and wikis and collaboration all in its easy-to-use clutches.
Yet, where there has been messaging in the past, there has been unsolicited commercial advertising otherwise known as spam.
It comes in the regular postal mail; it comes even more frequently through electronic mail. You get spam through instant messaging and maybe there have been cases of spam via telegrams and semaphore. After all, whatever permits humans to reach each other is bound to be eyed with glee by anyone with something to sell.
Bill Gates said in 2005 he had formulated a solution which extended the manner in which e-mail presently works. His sender ID plan (originally titled Caller ID) required a receiving mail server perform a measure of authentication to ensure the sender was legitimately who they claimed.
For this to work, every mail server in operation would require updating to cater for sender ID. Even if it could be supposed that would happen there would obviously be a period of time where the world's servers were in flux; some would be sender ID aware and others not.
Thus backwards compatibility would be paramount; a company who opt to upgrade right away to “Microsoft Exchange: Sender ID edition” (if it existed) can't afford to reject e-mails from trading partners simply because those partners have deferred updating their own infrastructure.
So you remain in a situation where hijacked botnets with open relays continue spamming mail down your pipes simply because you see them as a "not yet" upgraded mail server and skip over the sender ID requirement.
At one point it seemed Microsoft planned to wage war not just on spam but on competing mail software vendors by strongly implying Hotmail and MSN would flag all inbound e-mail as spam if it did not comply with the sender ID protocol.
Nevertheless, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ultimately rejected sender ID as flawed and unworkable.
Will Google Wave fare any better?
