Wired on Friday: During any discussion of ways to fight spam online, there is a famous joke form letter that internet veterans often roll out to silence eager new voices, writes Danny O'Brien.
Thanking new correspondents for their ingenious anti-spam idea, it goes on to explain exactly why their refreshing new strategy is impossible to implement.
For convenience, the explanation is simply a tick placed against one of 20 or so standard problems - that your idea might "require immediate total co-operation from everybody at once", or that it fails to account for "laws expressly forbidding it", or the "extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers". And so on. You can find the full list of reasons by Googling for "anti-spam form letter", but its cruel point is obvious.
Perhaps the classic example of this naivety was a prominent British MP who, after months of careful examination of the issues surrounding unsolicited commercial e-mail, had a brainwave one night and published a press release declaring the whole matter solved if only people would be compelled by law to stick their postal code at the end of their e-mail address. This way, miscreants could be tracked down using the convenient post code, and arrested in their homes.
Mark that one down to, among others, "requires too much cooperation from spammers", "users of email will not put up with it", and, cruelly perhaps, "technically illiterate politicians".
This is not to say that no progress has been made in the battle for our inboxes, or that many of the impossibilities listed in the form letter cannot be overcome with effort. But it can be heartbreakingly hard, even when one has a very good idea indeed.
One technique that has been gaining some traction recently is the "Sender Policy Framework", or SPF.
SPF's success is almost entirely down to the dedication of one man, Meng Weng Wong.
Wong is that rare beast - a techie who knows how to sell an idea. A softly-spoken but persuasive speaker, he has been pitching SPF to the world of the net for over a year now, gently lobbying and nudging antagonistic groups together, attending conferences across the world, while simultaneously writing code to help support his idea on a large number of different company's computer platforms.
Wong's idea is a simple little fix, which while not solving the spam problem on its own, will go some way to whittling down the size of the problem. What SPF does is this: if you receive an email purporting to be from, say, Yahoo, it allows your computer to confirm whether that message came from the computers that Yahoo usually sends mail from.
This is important for fighting spam, because it lowers the ability of spammers to claim that they are somebody they are not. AOL, for instance, can take a closer look at mail that says it is from the Bank of Ireland, when it appears to be arriving from a machine in Florida.
Certainly, SPF was impressive enough to attract the attention of the techies at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It's the IETF's job to define new standards for how the net works, a thankless task broadly comparable to getting herds of cats to write the US constitution. Nonetheless, they quickly seized on Wong's suggestion to fight one of the net's most pressing problems. Especially when the ever-diplomatic Wong persuaded Microsoft to combine his and their own similar spam-fighting proposals, called Sender-ID, into one complete standard.
And there, unfortunately, is where the problems began. The IETF's anti-spam standard was finished in record time, and was all ready to be rubber- stamped by the internet's great and good, when Microsoft threw a spanner into the works.
The company, after much hemming and hawing, insisted that anyone who used their's and Wong's combined idea, would have to first sign a contract with Microsoft.
In the business world, that does not sound too onerous a requirement. But for the net as a whole, it's a dealbreaker.
For one thing, Microsoft was somewhat vague about what that contract might contain. For another, Microsoft made it clear that it could revoke this licence at any time. And finally, such a rule would make the Microsoft/Wong proposal incompatible with the licences of open source software - the free, communally-written software that, just coincidentally, Microsoft regularly identifies as its chief competitor in the 21st century.
Springing this surprise on the IETF just a fortnight before the anti-spam measure was to become an official internet standard did not endear those who were to vote on its acceptance. The combined Microsoft/Wong proposal was voted down, and SPF currently lies in state of limbo.
Surprisingly, given the clout Microsoft wields, many companies have chosen to decline its terms, and are now working with Wong to reinstate his original proposals without the encumbrance of the Microsoft extensions. Unfortunately, even that backward step has not taken SPF out of the legal fog. On the eve of the failed vote, Microsoft revealed that it had filed patents that seek to claim ownership of even the non-Microsoft elements of the original SPF proposal.
The net's fight against spam continues, but it will advance a little slower for now. And Wong's one-man battle against the standard lines in that form letter continue. Sadly, he may yet be stymied by number seven in that well-worn list: "Your idea will not work \ Microsoft will not put up with it".
