E-mail Coalition Floats Plan to Stop Spam

The E-mail Service Provider Coalition of the Network Advertising Initiative plans to announce a blueprint for an Internet-wide technological solution to spam this week.

"We need to level the playing field and get one uniform standard," said Trevor Hughes, executive director of NAI. The Coalition members include e-mail service providers such as ClickAction, Yesmail, Mindshare Design, Cheetahmail and Digital Impact.

The NAI plan would change the e-mail architecture to keep spammers out and allow legitimate e-mail to pass through. E-mail senders would undergo a certification process under which each would have to meet a number of qualifications. E-mail service providers would register their clients.

"It would allow e-mail senders to ID themselves beyond a reasonable doubt," said Hans Peter Brondmo, senior vice president of strategy at Digital Impact, San Mateo, CA, who chairs the Coalition. "We’re going to make it so it’s impossible to deceive."

The system would operate rather like caller-ID, where if you don’t recognize the incoming telephone number, you don’t pick up the phone. Through the technology, "ISPs would be able to recognize the e-mail sender coming down the pike and stop their e-mail [if they were not identified as legitimate e-mailers]," Hughes said, unwilling to reveal many details, before the blueprint was formerly announced.

There would perhaps be varying levels of certification, said a source close to the blueprint committee. If a marketer is sending messages to customers with whom they have a relationship, then the mail would go to a bulk mail folder, for example. To get the e-mail into recipients’ main inboxes, perhaps the marketer would have to prove the e-mail addresses had been double-opted in.

Both e-mail senders and ISPs would be held accountable under the new system. E-mail service providers would have to continue to meet the certification requirements. And ISPs would have to account for why they are blocking e-mail as spam.

Spammers would be locked out because they wouldn’t be able to meet the certification requirements. "If you can shine a light on the legitimate senders, then anyone who comes in from the dark is going to create a lot of suspicion," Brondmo said.

Questions such as who is going to develop and pay for the technology have yet to be answered, Brondmo said.

The Direct Marketing Association has also begun to attack the spam problem. The New York-based association formed an as-yet-unnamed committee that has met a couple of times that would keep spam out of the system by establishing a set of standards that e-mail marketers would have to follow to be placed on a "gold list," said Lou Mastria, director of public and international affairs at the DMA.

E-mail senders would have to make "some kind of payment as an economic incentive," Mastria said.

ISPs are involved with both groups’ discussions. Nicholas J. Graham, spokesman for America Online, said the NAI blueprint "is something that we are interested in exploring."

Graham also pointed out that AOL "has seats on the DMA board. "I think the point is with marketers, we would have to have them at the table whenever we are sitting down and talking about an industry approach."

ISPs have met together to develop a solution as well, Graham confirmed.

Another groups, JamSpam, which is comprised of e-mail providers, e-mail security vendors, ISPs, high-volume e-mail senders and end-users, has had two meetings to discuss how to solve the spam issue. And, a fourth entity, the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is made up of engineers and other technology experts who helped establish the Internet, are have also started talks about how to stop the flow of unsolicited commercial e-mail.