Email authentication in the open

35 high-profile organisations sign open letter, calling for a rapid rollout of email authentication technologies

Last month an open letter was sent to members of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), calling for a rapid rollout of email authentication technologies. The letter was signed by 35 high-profile organisations including Amazon.com, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the Bank of America, CipherTrust, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, eBay, the Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC), IronPort Systems, Microsoft, Sendmail, Symantec and VeriSign, and was sent ahead of an email authentication summit held by the FTC and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The signatories of the letter pledged their support for email authentication standards, saying: 'We stand united in our fight against spam and phishing and in the support of email authentication standards. We are committed to deploy[ing] the Sender ID Framework by publishing our records and advance signing technologies such as Cisco's Identified Internet Mail and Yahoo's Domain Keys which can be rapidly deployed to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises worldwide.' The full letter can be read at http://truste.org/about/sender_id_industry_letter.php. The authentication summit itself provided little in the way of agreement on standards. Pavni Diwanji, of MailFrontier said, 'We'll be lucky if we solve 50 per cent of the problem [with email authentication].' However, there was general agreement among participants that email authentication is an essential first step toward an anti-spam solution.

2 December 2004

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