Spam busters: 'You're either with us or against us'

Five of the biggest names on the front line of the anti-spam battle - AOL, Brightmail, Microsoft, Sendmail and Yahoo! - have this week all declared their support for ID authentication systems as the way to finally defeat the problem of spam email.

And end users would be well advised to sign up - unless they want to find themselves in email excile.

Speaking yesterday at the RSA conference in San Francisco, Bill Gates outlined his vision of "Caller ID for email" - a method of verifying the sender's address. Meanwhile Yahoo! is talking about its DomainKeys technology, which is effectively a different means to the same end. Similarly AOL is making a lot of noise about its SPF (sender permitted from) system.

These technologies all require an element of buy-in from users - who must be prepared to authenticate themselves - but if it promises 'an end to spam' then very few consumers are likely to object.

According to the industry's largest anti-spam vendor, these tools, in conjunction with existing filtering, will bring an end to the spam deluge within two years. And end users are being told they are better off getting on board because with the industry's biggest names all pulling in one direction it's very much a case of 'you're either with us or against us'.

Enrique Salem, CEO of Brightmail, said companies have finally addressed the burning question at the heart of combating spam, namely: "How do we authenticate email?"

"The single biggest problem with email has always been the anonymity," he added - it's the major reason spammers have been able to evade detection and trick users into opening emails.

And now the ball has started rolling, Salem predicts we will see results fairly quickly.

"Within two years if you're not prepared to authenticate yourself then the best you can hope for is ending up in the junk mail folder," he said.

"But people willing to use these technologies will see an end to spam in their inboxes within those two years," he added, accepting that occasional "highly targeted emails" may still slip through the net.

However, as far as the scatter-gun marketing of everything from generic Viagra and penis enlargements to septic tanks and low interest loans is concerned it could spell the end, Salem says.

However, he warned email spam is still likely to get worse before it gets any better. At the moment spam on average accounts for 60 per cent of all email. Before the decline sets in Salem predicts it will reach around 70 to 75 per cent.

Brightmail's spam filtering service will support all three major authentication systems - bringing them to more than 300 million mailboxes worldwide.

Sendmail has also announced it is backing Microsoft's authentication - though Brightmail's Salem added that three different protocols will not necessarily make for conflict - and the three will likely be interoperable.

Eric Allman, CTO at Sendmail, believes the key to ensuring success for authentication is to encourage rapid and widespread adoption. Allman claims Sendmail's support and user base, which includes more than 700 Fortune 1000 companies, will help to force these issues.