Timberway.com - FTC Testing Anti-Spam Standards

You Are Invited To Participate in the FTC Anti-Spam Testing Of Email Domain-Level Authentication Standards

Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), better known as Spam, has become such a big problem that the U.S. government's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been looking at ways to combat spam.  Once way is through domain-level authentication of email.

In its June 2004 Report to Congress on a possible Do Not Email Registry, the FTC identified domain level authentication of email as an important first step in solving the spam problem. Domain-level authentication would help remedy one of the root causes of spam email - the anonymity of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ("SMTP") email protocol.

In November 2004, the FTC and the Department of Commerce's National Institute for Standards and Technology ("NIST") held a two-day Email Authentication Summit, at which proponents of various domain-level authentication standards and other interested parties discussed domain-level authentication for email. Proponents of five of the proposed standards agreed to make their testing results public in order to assist in the evaluation of their standards.

The five standards are based on two different approaches to doing email domain-level authentication: Internet Protocol-based (IP) standards and cryptography-based standards.

The IP-based (Internet Protocol) standards are:

1.  Sender ID
2.  Client SMTP Validation ("CSV")

The cryptography-based standards are:

1.  Bounce Address Tag Validation ("BATV")
2.  DomainKeys
3.  Identified Internet Mail ("IIM")

The FTC is inviting companies to participate in testing these five domain-level authentication standards.  They've prepared a questionnaire, and plan to look at issues such as the functionality, interoperability, scalability, and effectiveness of these standards.

Learn more or participate in the FTC's testing of email domain-level authentication standards...

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