Nov 11, 2004 : Email Providers Support Cisco Standard

📅 November 11, 2004 - More than 35 industry vendors, including end-user, email service provider, and anti-spam technology companies, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology this week expressing their cooperation in boosting anti-spam and anti-phishing efforts by supporting certain email-authentication technologies including the Cisco (cisco.com) Identified Internet Mail specification.

The vendors and users delivered the letter prior to the FTC and NIST's Email Authentication Summit, held in Washington DC on November 9 and 10, stating that they would work "together to lead the adoption of email authentication technologies." The participants also said path-based and signature-based approaches were complementary, and called for the deployment of email authentication through "incorporating multiple approaches and technologies" to address the ranges of platforms, user environments and deployment requirements worldwide. Vendors and users said they would support this initiative by publishing path-based records and advance signature-based technologies such as Cisco's Identified Internet Mail.
"The support from these companies is a milestone achievement for Cisco Identified Internet Mail as an anti-spam, anti-phishing technology," says Dave Rossetti, VP of Cisco and the head of the Cisco Technology Center. "Our approach with Identified Internet Mail has been to work to ensure it is backwards-compatible with and preserves the positive aspects of today's email infrastructure including the privacy of users and the ability for a user to send email to any other user."
Cisco, in an effort to support the widespread adoption of Identified Internet Mail, submitted an updated version of the proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force in October 2004. It also released an open-source implementation of the proposal to enable customers and the software developer community to download and contribute to further innovations in the technology. A number of reputable enterprises and Internet service providers are planning to trial Identified Internet Mail as part of their solution against spam and phishing.