Barely two days after ePrivacy Group unveiled its Trusted E-Mail Open Standard plan, three respected consumer advocacy groups with strong Internet interests endorsed the proposal.
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE), CAUCE Canada, and the SpamCon Foundation announced May 2 that they support TEOS "as a way to help consumers and e-mail providers reliably separate legitimate e-mail from spam, and to help bulk e-mail senders comply with current and proposed anti-spam legislation." They announced their endorsement on the final day of the Federal Trade Commission's three-day spam conference.
Based on ePrivacy technology, the TEOS lets e-mail senders make "verifiable assertions" in message heads about their identity and message content, with Internet service providers and consumers alike able to use them to manage incoming e-mail - whether by sorting, whitelisting, and whether by sender, content, or other criteria.
"(We believe) that an open standard such as this will benefit the entire international Internet community by creating an environment in which email senders can voluntarily decide to provide trustworthy identification about who they are and what their messages say," SpamCon president Laura Atkins said. "These assertions will help users and ISPs make informed choices about what email they will accept."
One theme of the FTC spam conference was a call for consensus-based efforts to help e-mailers add verification reliability to their messages. Conference panelists said voluntary certified trust tools - which is what the TEOS aims to be - can only help markets, ISPs, and consumers who are otherwise lost to separate the meat from the spam in their inboxes, or to know who is real and who is spoofing it.
The ePrivacy TEOS plan also calls for an independent, nonprofit oversight body to monitor fast and expedient deployment of the protocols.
CAUCE Canada chairman Neil Schwartzman said creating multiple authorities which might set their own standards for appropriate e-mail conduct would give consumers the most power to choose which mail to accept and reject. CAUCE board member John Levine, who sat on one of the FTC conference panels, said these multiple authorities and open standards could also cut down on "the potential damage of blacklists and other such spam-filtering solutions to legitimate, opt-in communications."
