Bill Gates Outlines Technology Vision to Help Stop Spam

-- Create viable alternatives for smaller-scale e-mail senders to distinguish themselves from spammers

Caller ID for E-Mail

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.

The proposal involves three steps to authenticate a sender:

1. E-mail senders, large or small, publish the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of their outbound e-mail servers in the Domain Name System (DNS) in a format described in the Caller ID for E-Mail specification.

2. Recipient e-mail systems examine each message to determine the purported responsible domain (i.e., the Internet domain that purports to have sent the message).

...continued