Bill Gates has had a bad week at the office. The man who has made it a personal mission to see spam eradicated from our inboxes saw Micro-soft’s Sender ID anti-spam technology returned to sender by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and was subsequently snubbed by the world’s biggest Internet service provider, America Online (AOL).
In what looks like a test of Microsoft’s relationship with open-source culture, an IETF working group voted not to proceed with the Sender ID standards proposal sent by Microsoft in June, citing concerns over intellectual property claims.
AOL also decided to limit its involvement. It said: ”Given recent concerns expressed by the IETF, coupled with the tepid support for Sender ID in the open source community, AOL has decided to move forward with Sender Policy Framework (SPF).” However, AOL has agreed to submit lists of its mail servers’ unique numeric addresses so other service providers using Sender ID can verify mail coming from AOL users.
SPF is a means whereby incoming mail is identified against new domain name servers to verify it is coming from the original sender. Sender ID combines Microsoft’s Caller ID e-mail technology and SPF. To complicate matters further, Yahoo is developing an authentication system called DomainKeys. This works by creating an encrypted e-mail address signature, which is then checked by the receiving domain.
According to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-spam firm Sophos, the issue is unlikely to be resolved easily. ”Bill Gates is said to have personally vetoed conceding to the Internet community’s request to make the Sender ID technology available without any protective licensing.
”This is a kick in the teeth for Gates, who proposed Sender ID as one of the three principles by which he believed spam would be eradicated within two or three years. Now that prediction seems less likely to come true.”
But Microsoft says the debate has been misinterpreted. ”People have been saying our patent application was secret, but it was released last week. The fact is a small vocal minority of about 20 firms have been influencing the IETF, and those firms have no concept of intellectual property,” says a spokesperson, Sean Sundwall. — Â