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From...
ISPs band together to fight a common enemy: Spam
October 1, 1998
Web posted at: 12:15 PM EDT
by David Essex
(IDG) -- Normally competitors, 20 Internet service providers, telephone companies, and portal services from around the world united last week to fight a common enemy: spam.
At the Spam Roundtable in Santa Barbara, California sponsored by Software.com, Internet mainstays such as America Online, AT&T WorldNet, Excite, and MCI discussed strategies for self-regulation in an industry that bears the cost of the extra resources required for bulk e-mail traffic.
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"This is the first time you've had the group of service providers all getting together," says Software.com spokesperson Alison Parker. Discussion topics included ways to differentiate between spam and legitimate bulk mail, state-of-the-art filtering techniques, and methods for stopping spam at the source.
Spam is also a privacy and free-speech issue, so those topics got plenty of discussion. "Privacy is the number one issue facing the Internet, and the need to resolve the problems created by junk mail will affect the future of the online world for many years to come," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He noted that pending legislation could require prior consent by recipients, the establishment of a universal exclusion list, and including the sender's actual ID in e-mail rather than a pseudonym.
The roundtable showed that spam isn't nearly as pervasive outside the United States, though international providers "see it coming and really want to be prepared for it," according to Parker. Participants were also concerned about the privacy implications of requiring identifying information in the body of a message rather than in the header. This approach might require ISPs to read part of each message, which they are reluctant to do, Parker says.
Group members plan to take a "crawl-walk-run approach" that includes future roundtables, ad hoc efforts to share information about spam originators, and possibly organizing the group formally, Parker says.