Microsoft Outlines Policy and Technical Proposals Aimed at Helping Contain The Spam Problem, Including the Development of Caller ID for E-Mail

In his keynote address at the RSA Conference 2004 today, Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced a detailed vision and proposals on how technology can be used to help put an end to spam, including outlining the company's Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative (CSRI) and technical specifications for the establishment of Caller ID for E-Mail. "Spam is our e-mail customers' No. 1 complaint today, and Microsoft is innovating on many different fronts to eradicate it," Gates said. "We believe that Caller ID for E-Mail and the Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative will help change the economic model for sending spam and put spammers out of business." To be more effective in the fight against junk e-mail, filters need additional information that is not available in e-mail messages today. Microsoft believes some relatively simple but systemwide changes to the e-mail infrastructure are needed to provide greater certainty about the origin of an e-mail message and to enable legitimate senders to more clearly distinguish themselves from spammers. Existing spam filters look at an e-mail message's origin to determine whether it is spam. However, there is currently no guarantee that an e-mail message came from whom it says it did. "Spoofing," or sending e-mail purporting to be from someone it's not, is an increasingly common and relatively simple way for spammers to trick filters. In addition, this practice can pose a security risk when used to deliver e-mail viruses. Microsoft has developed the Caller ID for E-Mail proposal to help eliminate domain spoofing and increase the effectiveness of spam filters by verifying what domain a message came from -- much like how caller ID for telephones shows the phone number of the person calling.