[Am-info] Seal Of Approval To Weed Out Spam? MickySoft has "signed on."

[Fred A. Miller]

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Seal Of Approval To Weed Out Spam?

Privacy group Trust-e on Thursday introduced its "Trusted 
Sender" program to help E-mail users keep spam out of their 
in-boxes. Under the program, a privacy seal of approval is 
placed on E-mail messages from participating companies. To 
qualify for the seal, companies must meet Trust-e's E-mail 
best practices and principles, says Fran Maier, executive 
director of the nonprofit group. Those include the use of 
accurate subject lines, participation in Trust-e's dispute-
resolution process, and allowing users to opt-out of future 
mailings. Companies that have already agreed to support the 
program include Microsoft, DoubleClick, Topica, and Bigfoot 
Interactive. 

Participating mailers install a piece of hardware inside their 
firewall, which signs each outgoing piece of E-mail with a 
unique "digital smart field," says Vince Schiavone, president 
and CEO of ePrivacy Group, which is providing the technology 
for the program. Users with HTML-capable browsers will see a 
seal in the top right corner of E-mail messages; others will 
see a link in the top line of the text. "When a user clicks on 
that, a secure transaction takes place to verify it's 
legitimate," Schiavone says. "It's like a cryptographic 
envelope." The system serves to confirm that the message 
really came from a trusted sender, and it can't be faked by 
unscrupulous spammers, he says. 

Though the Trusted Sender program doesn't keep other unsealed 
E-mails from clogging in-boxes, Schiavone believes that's the 
next step. He's spoken to several software vendors and mail-
filtering companies and expects future versions of E-mail 
clients to filter out unapproved messages. Maier believes that 
the program also will weed out uncooperative spammers through 
attrition. "Their efforts will get less and less successful," 
she says. "Hopefully that will lessen their persistence." 

The Trust-e program is the latest shot in a growing war 
against spam E-mail. The Federal Trade Commission is preparing 
to launch "a systematic attack on fraudulent and deceptive 
spam," said J. Howard Beales, director of the FTC's Bureau of 
Consumer Protection, speaking at a privacy and security 
conference in Washington, D.C., this week. Beales said the 
bureau is examining possible cases for legal action. And two 
weeks ago, the Direct Marketing Association, an industry trade 
group, approved new privacy guidelines for member companies, 
requiring them to let consumers opt out of marketing E-mails 
and to choose whether they want their personal information 
shared. - David M. Ewalt and Rick Whiting

For the full story, see:
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFp80Bce7K0V20BWDI0AB

Read on:
Building A Unified Antispam Front 
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFp80Bce7K0V20RXF0AH

- -- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org

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