Internet engineers working on a standard for identifying the source of e-mail messages voted down a proposal by Microsoft to make some of the company's intellectual property a mandatory part of the solution.

On Saturday, a co-chair of the technical working group responsible for developing a standard for authenticating the origin of e-mail messages summarized the results of a vote by the group members. The group--part of the Internet Engineering Task Force and more formerly known as the MTA Authorization Records in DNS, or MARID, working group--decided that Microsoft's insistence on keeping secret a possible patent application on its proposed technology was unacceptable.

"The working group has at least (reached a) rough consensus that the patent claims should not be ignored," Andrew Newton, one of two co-chairs of the working group, wrote in an e-mail to the group's discussion forum. "It is the opinion of the co-chairs that MARID should not undertake work on alternate algorithms reasonably thought to be covered by the patent application."