Microsoft’s bid to have its SenderID anti-spam protocol adopted widely has taken another blow, with America Online saying Microsoft’s failure to win over those leery of the Redmond, Washington software giant’s business practices moved AOL to reject SenderID.
Various reports suggested the AOL move was the latest consequence of Microsoft’s longrunning battle with the open source software community.
The open source community hopes Microsoft will relent and allow its anti-spam technology to be used more liberally and not proceed with plans to license its contribution to a universal anti-spam protocol. Microsoft and the Open Source Initiative are said to be continuing talks on how to break the impasse, but optimism continues to fade.
Microsoft and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) are locked in discussions over how to mend the rift over Sender ID anti-spoofing technology that has driven a number of Open Source companies to reject it for their products.
In May, Microsoft combined its SenderID with another developed by Meng Wong, Sender Policy Framework, and submitted them to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval, but a number of key anti-spam technology players have since rejected it because Microsoft holds patents on the core SenderID technology and they don’t trust Microsoft to keep its word when it says it will not charge royalties.
And Open Source Initiative general counsel Larry Rosen, with whom Microsoft has been in discussions over the issue, has been quoted this week as saying Microsoft probably won’t contribute to the universal anti-spam protocol without at least some protective licensing.
“There are important issues at stake: they understand it, and we understand it,” Rosen told reporters. “I think that if they listen to what we're saying, that they can end up with a patent license that is good for them and good for us.”
E-mail security firm MessageLabs is also said to believe Microsoft isn’t going to bend and make the SenderID license compatible to those in the open source community, with one MessageLabs technologist saying Microsoft already believes it met Rosen’s group half way and that the Open Source Initiative is being “unreasonable.”
The impasse will mean e-mail providers will have to use two anti-spam standards that were combined until recently, instead of agreeing on a common standard to segregate fake e-mail addresses the spammers use, according to a published report which quoted Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall as saying, in effect, what’s-the-big-deal.
“It’s still going to be one standard,” Sundwall was quoted as saying. “There’s just going to be two flavors.” Microsoft plans to begin using SenderID on Hotmail beginning in October.
AOL will continue using Wong’s Sender Policy Framework flavor, but they’ll test other methods including one Yahoo has proposed to use encrypted digital signatures to authenticate the real e-mail away from the spam.
