Execs warned: Don't ignore spam menace

The US Congress and a few states have passed laws that would impose jail time for some offenders. On Tuesday, the legislature of Ohio passed a bill that could bring out-of-state spammers to trial and impose harsh financial penalties and jail sentences. The bill, which has yet to be signed by the governor, follows the example of the federal government's Can-Spam bill, which went into effect at the beginning of 2004. Can-Spam would impose punishments based on falsified email headers and "sexually oriented" messages that are not properly labeled as such.

At the same time, email providers are taking their own steps to battle spam, steps that aren't necessarily in line with one another.

Yahoo and Cisco have both created email systems that use digital signatures to verify the sender's authenticity, called "DomainKeys" and "Identified Internet Mail", respectively. While the two products compete against each other, the companies are in discussions to establish some common ground, according to Cisco executive David Rossetti.

Other providers, such as Microsoft and America Online, are trying to tackle email authentication by cross checking addresses with domain name service records. The idea is to ensure that the "@yourbank.com" address in one's in-box jibes with the message's underlying, numbered Internet protocol address.

Microsoft in May merged its "Caller ID for email" technology with Pobox.com's SPF, or "Sender Permitted From" approach.

Microsoft submitted the merged technology, called "Sender ID", to the IETF standards body but faced resistance when people in the open-source community claimed Microsoft could charge royalties.

Microsoft eventually retracted its changes after open-source groups; America Online, which supports SPF; and Wong's Pobox.com pulled their support for Sender ID. Wong himself has filed with the IETF to standardise SPF. Yahoo has also filed to standardise DomainKeys.

Despite disagreements on how to tackle the spam problem, industry executives agree that spam can never be fully eradicated. Instead, companies, service providers and consumers alike will need to make their own contributions to reduce and prevent spam from harming their computers.

"There is no silver bullet to this problem," said Richard Gingras, CEO of Goodmail.