If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message.
Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID, he said.
Sender ID is a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail by ensuring the validity of the server from which the e-mail came. While the purpose of curbing junk mail may be laudable, the debate on how to stop the tide of junk mail is still ongoing. According to Microsoft, up to 90 percent of e-mail is spam. Critics say Sender ID, which includes technology developed by Microsoft, is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings. Also, there are technologies that compete with Sender ID, such as Yahoo"s DomainKeys.
"We think Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard," said Dave Rand, chief technologist for Internet content security at security software company Trend Micro.