Anti-Spam Caller ID Tested by AOL

Who says caller ID is restricted only to telephones?! In a move to further combat spam, America Online started testing Sender Permitted Form (SPF), an anti-spam filter, last week. SPF will cease email forgery, otherwise known as spoofing.

Essentially, spoofing is the process of spammers forging other domain names or creating false ones themselves. It is a perpetual and major problem in the industry due partially to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP); this is the current standard email method for sending messages. As of now, SMTP cannot detect and verify a sender’s identity.

“Spoofing of email has become a tremendous issue for the industry,” stated AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham to CNET News. “This allows us to help recipients of AOL email to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

SPF, only one of several protocols being developed and tested,”prompts AOL’s receiving system to take the suspected email and match it with the public registry of legitimate domain names AOL provides,” MediaPost summarized.

In Layman’s terms, recipients of emails will have the opportunity to ensure that a particular email is, in fact, being sent from that address, rather than a spoofed one.

Moreover, if SPF proves itself to be effective, it will safeguard both invidual address owners and email servers from being accused of sending spam.

AOL, boasting a member base of 33 million, forged an alliance last year with Yahoo, EarthLink, and Microsoft to combat spam.

“You couldn’t ask for a better testing ground than AOL,” said Bill McCloskey, Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, to MediaDaily news. “If it does hold up, SPF could become the standard anti-spoofing technology.

While there are several standards vying for attention, AOL is the first to adopt this technology on a wide scale.”

Although some industry researchers feel that SPF is not yet fully developed in order to be effective, it is certain that anti-spoofing systems will become a normality in the future.

 back to top