Over 80 members of the E-mail Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) -- which provides e-mail delivery services to over 250,000 clients in North America -- will gather at the Microsoft campus today for a summit on the Sender ID Framework, demonstrating strong consensus toward authenticated e-mail solutions to the problems of spam, domain spoofing and phishing.

Sender ID is an emerging technical approach designed to ensure that e-mail originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from by validating the sender's server Internet Protocol (IP) address. It combines Microsoft's Caller ID for E-Mail technology with the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authored by Meng Weng Wong, CTO of Pobox.com, and is currently being evaluated by the Internet Engineering Task Force as an industry standard for e-mail authentication.

Spoofing, or sending e-mail purporting to be from someone it's not, is an increasingly common and relatively simple way for spammers to try to trick spam filters. It can also pose a security risk when used to deliver e-mail viruses or phishing scams, which attempt to trick users into divulging sensitive information, such as credit card numbers or account passwords, by pretending to be from a legitimate source, such as a user's bank. Sender ID aims to prevent spoofing by confirming what domain a message came from. Doing so can help legitimate senders protect their domain names and reputations, and help recipients more effectively identify and filter junk e-mail.

To learn more about Sender ID and the significance of today's summit for the e-mail community, PressPass spoke with Craig Spiezle, director of industry and partner relations for Microsoft's Safety Technology and Strategy Team, and Trevor Hughes, executive director of the ESPC.