Patent Row Dooms Anti-Spam Effort
From Associated Press
A dispute over intellectual property claims from Microsoft Corp. has dealt a fatal blow to an ambitious effort by Internet engineers to create a technical standard for curbing junk e-mail.
The failure to reach consensus on the Microsoft-championed proposal known as Sender ID throws back to the free market a process many consider urgent in view of the unrelenting onslaught of spam.
Sender ID’s effectiveness and compatibility with existing mail systems were already in question before members of the Internet Engineering Task Force got hung up on the patent battle, said Yakov Shafranovich, a leading anti-spam activist.
