Three of cyberspace's heavyweights - America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo - have linked together to sock spam, launching what they call an open dialogue to bring in more cyberspace players "to drive technical standards and industry guidelines" adoptable no matter what platforms are involved.
"(We) believe that the issue of spam can only be significantly addressed through a comprehensive approach, including technology, responsible customer communications, appropriate legislation, enforcement and consumer education," the three companies said in a joint statement.
The linking of the three in the anti-spam fight comes as spam seems to have tripled over the past few months. And the spammers seem also to have decided not to take it anymore, either - at least one group of spammers, as AVN Online reported last week, has decided to take a pair of spam fighters into court.
"(F)ighting spam is priority number one, because spammers are public enemy number one, both to us and to our members," said AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis. "With this joint announcement, we are making a timely, bold and critical statement: spam is an industry-wide challenge, requiring industry-wide teamwork, in order to yield industry-wide solutions. By cooperating and collaborating together, we can make real progress against this toxin that pollutes the Internet environment."
AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo plan to focus on protecting consumers from receiving spam by slowing if not stopping spammers' ability to use deception in subject lines and e-mail headers, through "leveraging existing directories of Internet addresses such as the domain name system to better identify the location from which e-mail is originating," the three said.
The threesome also wants to try to curtail the unauthorized use of open relays, open routers, and open proxies for spam and to limit mail that uses concealment techniques aimed at hiding a spammer's identity, the statement continued. Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail program recently put limits on the number of e-mails members of the free service can send as one spam-fighting technique.
AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo said they want to try getting others in cyberspace to cut back on the ability to create fake e-mail accounts, define ways to facilitate consumer complaint exchanges and feedback between e-mail providers, determine the best and safest anti-spam policies which the entire Internet industry could share, and work where necessary with law enforcement to step up the pressure on spammers who use fraud to beat the spam-stopping filters or otherwise break any anti-spam laws.
"The time has come for competitors and the industry at large to work together to address the burden of spam," said Microsoft antispam executive sponsor David Cole, who is also a senior vice president for MSN and Personal Services. "By bringing together different perspectives and expertise, we have a real opportunity to rebuild trust in email."
The latter effort, the three companies said, will involve developing better means of saving electronic evidence related to spammers and their doings; get Internet service providers and e-businesses to work more together against spammers; and, get them to work together in referring spammers to government authorities.
"Fighting spam is a priority for (us) because we are committed to delivering to our users the highest quality products and services," said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer for Yahoo, whose free e-mail service is also widely used. "Industry collaboration with AOL, Microsoft and other key stakeholders to collectively address this problem is an important step to helping protect people from spam and to enhance their online experience."
The AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo announcement came just days before the Federal Trade Commission's public spam-fighting forum was to begin April 30, at the commission's headquarters in Washington. The forum is scheduled to run through May 2.
Earlier this month, the FTC all but forced spammer Bruce Westby to cease and desist putting falsely benign subject lines into mass e-mails aimed at drawing Netizens to his Married But Lonely and other adult Websites.
Last week, Network Advertising Initiative announced they'd pulled together a group of nineteen e-mail providers to develop a protocol of certification for bulk e-mailers, in an effort to distinguish better between legitimate commercial e-mailers and spammers. Among other things, they're working on a variant of caller-ID for e-mail, in which Internet service providers would recognize an e-mail sender and stop his or her materials if they were not recognized as legitimate senders.
This protocol, NAI said, would hold e-mailers and ISPs almost equally accountable, making e-mailers stay within whatever certification requirements might be developed and ISPs account for why they block e-mail as spam.
