Global anti-spam "neighbourhood watch" coalition formed

A group of international telecom providers, internet service providers and software companies plan to form a "neighbourhood watch" to oust junk email from their collective networks, in what is the latest industry coalition bent on eradicating spam.

Telecoms and ISPs including Bell Canada, Bell South, Cox, Internet Initiative Japan and IIJ America, along with messaging software company OpenWave Systems, which is leading the initiative, will formally announce their anti-spam working group today.

The companies have joined to tackle technical issues related to spam and email viruses at the network level, rather than focus on more topical anti-junk mail methods such as content filtering. Part of their plan is to watch each others' backs.

Richard Wong, general manager of the messaging group for OpenWave, said: "Simply put, we can create a worldwide real-time neighbourhood watch. If I am blocking some eastern European IP address, and if I know this spammers' identity, why wouldn't I share that with my neighbourhood."

That means member ISPs would share information on US and international spammers automatically. Or ISPs would notify each other before blacklisting a set of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from a rival network that were used for spamming, Wong said, whereas currently ISPs typically reject email originating from blacklisted addresses without notifying anyone. The result would be an ISP code of conduct for spam, he said.

The group is emerging at a time when spam has reached crushing proportions; more than half of all email sent is unsolicited bulk messages. ISPs, marketers, email and software providers are all desperate to find technical solutions to spam outside of the recently enacted federal anti-spam law, and many of them are coordinating efforts.

AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft have aligned in a separate anti-spam group to drive technical standards and guidelines that will work for any software or hardware systems. Despite the publicised effort, the group has yet to introduce any proposals.

One objective of the telecom group is to agree on a standard for preventing IP spoofing - the practice of faking the origin of a message - and identification forgery. Both are common calling cards of spammers and the chief obstacles to holding junk mailers accountable. Wong said that the group is looking at emerging technical standards to prevent email spoofing, such as Designated Mailer Protocol (DMP), which the Internet Engineering Task Force is in the process of validating as a protocol. DMP is similar to Caller ID but for email, and would help ISPs identify that a sender is legitimate.

But for any standard to be effective, all of the ISPs must adopt it.

Todd Dean, director of data operations at Cox, said in a statement: "This collaboration will make it easier for us to address the issues more efficiently and defend our customers from messaging abuse."

The group held its first meeting on 16 December 2003, in Boston, and plans to hold an anti-spam summit in the spring. It currently has 22 members and plans to grow that number to more than 100 in the next two months, Wong said. OpenWave is in talks with Micosoft, Yahoo! and AOL about joining the collaboration.

Stefanie Olsen writes for CNET News.com