Antispam proposals advance in the IETF

Once again the battle between SPF and SenderID is working its way through the IETF. Nice overview article at News.com about it. I think SPF will get wide support given how easy it is to set up and run with little to no changes required to a network. SenderID will take a lot more work to get widespread adoption. It has another mark against it being sponsored by Microsoft (which is a shame in many ways) and by them having patent issues with the proposed standard.

I personally think the combination of SPF and DomainKeys will be what most folks go for. DomainKeys is clean, does not have any patent issues that I am aware of and is currently supported by Yahoo! and Google already in addition to making it through the first rounds of the IETF. Either way, I think every Service Provider in the world is going to do both of these for two reasons. First is to reduce the amount of UCE (SPAM) on their networks (cost savings) and second is because it is difficult to run and administer all these solutions as a SMB owner or even the small tech shops that support them. The Service Providers want it to be difficult to run MTA's and DNS on a network, that way you will pay the fees to use their solutions. A win-win as far as they are concerned. Oh, and they can really mess up your day if they refuse to do reverse DNS delegation with you and you are running an MTA. So much for the openness of the Internet!

Bigger enterprise groups will continue to run their own infrastructure since they will have the staff and expertise to support it. Something to think about.
- Ed