Subject: SenderID for the greater good?

From: AccuSpam <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 12:33:27 +0800

I just finished reading a reasonably significant portion of the relevant comments in the ietf-mxcomp archives:

http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/threads.html

IMHO, the two "successful" arguments for continuing with SenderID that must be refuted are:

1. Companies of importance, e.g. AOL, will have no problem with the SenderID license.

2. Anti-forgery with SenderID will gain adoption much faster with Microsoft's influence and help.

IMHO, the rest of the arguments for SenderID were already reasonably refuted.

Here is my opinion on how to refute these:

1. A standard should be implementable by all, or at least most.  Even though for example AOL claims they can implement as a receiver without IPR problems, they and we all should IMHO also be concerned about implementation of other receivers, because AOL and all of us are also a senders of e-mail.

2. But under Microsoft's control with the added leverage of being endorsed as public standard, which is IMHO not the spirit of internet standards.  In general I think it is not wise, nor consistent with the RFCs under which IETF supposedly operates, to create "internet standards" which give leverage to one competitor over **ALL** others, by "standardizing" on one competitor's license.  The larger question though is the greater good helped more than hurt?  IMHO, anti-forgery (especially per-domain anti-forgery) is not a complete solution to spam, and thus doing any action that would could stifle the diversity of competition in anti-spam, is very dangerous to the greater good.

AccuSpam is an example of a anti-spam receiver which may not be able to implement SenderID if it requires signing a license with Microsoft, because it is possible that Microsoft may one day view AccuSpam as a competitor to some anti-spam product from Microsoft and AccuSpam might not want to give Microsoft the leverage of an executed license.

Regards,
Shelby Moore