Washington, May 26: The backers of two anti-spam proposals said on Tuesday they would work together to provide a single standard that would make it easier for Internet providers to block unwanted junk e-mail. Giant software company Microsoft Corp. and Pobox.com co-founder Meng Wong said they would combine their approaches, which both aim to weed out fake e-mail addresses used by spammers to cover their tracks.
Both Microsoft's Caller ID for e-mail and Wong's Sender Policy Framework would allow Internet providers to check that a message from joe@example.com actually comes from the numerical addresses used by example.com's e-mail servers. Mail that did not match up could be safely rejected as spam.
The standard would pose few difficulties for most companies that handle e-mail, and individual users would not have to make any changes at all. E-mail forwarders like Pobox.com would have to make the biggest efforts to comply with the new standard, Wong said.
"What we're trying to do is tell if an incoming e-mail is really coming from where it says it's coming from," Wong said. Bureau Report