AOL testing new anti-spam filter with caller ID
22 January 2004
AOL, the online unit of media group Time Warner has been testing an up-and-coming authentication protocol for preventing email forgeries or spoofing.
Involving its 33 million subscribers worldwide, the test is the first large scale test for the product, which is currently being considered by standard groups alongside a number of other email validation proposals.
The technology known as Sender Permitted From (SPF) could be criticial to the development of an email verification standard if it is endorsed and could encourage other major email providers to use it.
Nicholas Graham a spokesman for AOL told CNET News: 'Spoofing of e-mail has become a tremendous issue for the industry, and this allows us to help recipients of AOL e-mail to separate the wheat from the chaff.'
Spoofing is one of the most difficult problems facing ISPs and anti-spam companies simply because the method used to send email doesn't offer any widespread means to identify and validate a senders identity.
Usually junk mailers cover themselves by hacking into unprotected email servers or by falsifying email addresses or names in the sender field.
At present, there are two other SPF technical specifications being looked at by a subcommittee of the Anti-Spam Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force.
One example of how SPF would work with AOL, an email recipient could look at an SPF record from AOL to ensure that the email which seems to originate from one of its servers was actually sent from that address. This can be done by using the record to cross check DNS data associated with AOL's IP addresses.
If successful the system would protect email servers and addresses from having their addresses falsely suspected of sending spam.
Other efforts have been launched to address the problem, but none have failed to gain widespread adoption.
Last year AOL formed an alliance with Yahoo, Microsoft and EarthLink to develop and eventually use anti-spam technologies, although nothing has yet happened as a result of this, separate companies are all conducting trials at the moment.
Online service providers have had to look into such systems since spam causes problems for one of the Internet's most popular activities - email. More than 50 per cent of email sent today is unwanted junk.
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