After submitting its Caller ID e-mail authentication specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. is now in detailed discussions to merge the specification with another, called Sender Policy Framework, or SPF. E-mail experts from the Redmond, Washington, software company will spend the weekend meeting with SPF author Meng Weng Wong of Pobox.com and looking for ways to merge the closely related Caller ID and SPF standards, according to Wong.
"Basically, we"re going to take SPF and Caller-ID and do a "cut and paste,"" Wong said Friday by telephone before boarding a plane to Redmond. Unveiled by Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in March, Caller ID makes it harder to doctor unsolicited commercial, or spam, e-mail so that it appears to come from legitimate Web domains.