July 2, 2005 -- Microsoft recently announced it will more heavily utilize its Sender ID technology when filtering email sent to its Hotmail service. Anti-spam expert and http://www.spambutcher.com founder, Rich Olson is skeptical how much this will do to combat spam.

"The biggest misunderstanding about Sender ID is that it's a general anti-spam solution,” Olson said. “It's not, and Microsoft doesn't claim that it is. Its main purpose is to certify that an email message actually came from the claimed sender."

Sender ID allows organizations to publish records indicating which servers or networks are approved for sending email from their domains. For example, a bank may publish a Sender ID record listing a handful of email servers that can legitimately send mail on its behalf. Email messages originating from other servers are likely to be from fraudulent senders engaged in 'phishing' attempts.

"Sender ID is useful for organizations with a high risk of fraud and a tightly controlled IT infrastructure,” Olson said. “For many companies, limiting outgoing email to a few servers or networks isn't practical. Employees who work at home, or are 'road warriors' commonly have to send email through alternate servers. For these companies the value of Sender ID is greatly diminished."

Domain owners can configure Sender ID to allow any network address to send email for them. In this case, Sender ID does not provide an effective way to validate the sender. Out of existing domains that have implemented Sender ID, a large portion of their records don't place restrictions on what networks or servers are valid to send email from.

"Users looking for an anti-spam solution are still best served by a client-side spam filter application like SpamButcher,” Olson said. “By using client-side filtering, users can easily adjust preferences, and review any filtered messages."

SpamButcher is available as a free 21-day trial download from http://www.spambutcher.com. When optimally configured, it can stop up to 98% of junk email.

"While competing products use a subscription model, SpamButcher is a one-time purchase,” Olson said. “For just $29.95 users can solve their spam problem indefinitely."

About the Author
Rich Olson is "Chief Butcher" (CEO) of SpamButcher (http://www.spambutcher.com). He has spent the last three years engineering software to eliminate spam for end users. SpamButcher is a privately held Seattle, WA, based company with over 180,000 trial users.