An ongoing effort to consolidate antispam authentication schemes took a big step forward with the merging of Sender Policy Framework and Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail.Microsoft said on Tuesday that it had agreed to combine its Caller ID efforts with the SPF, a specification crafted by Pobox.com Chief Technology Officer Meng Wong. The two had said last week that they were cooperating toward that end.
Wong called Microsoft's embracement of SPF a crucial win for the technology, which has already gained the backing of America Online, EarthLink and Google.
"Microsoft was the last remaining obstacle," Wong said. "Almost everyone else was already onboard. Nobody wants to be squashed by Microsoft, so I'm glad they came around to our point of view on their own."
SPF, which formerly stood for "Sender Permitted From," and Caller ID attack a fundamental weakness in the omnipresent Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: E-mail recipients have no way of determining whether senders are who they say they are.
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