Microsoft to announce legal, technical antispam plans

Microsoft Corp., along with other Internet industry players, is due to announce Wednesday lawsuits against spammers under the U.S.' so-called Can-Spam Act, and will detail a technical initiative aimed at stopping the onslaught of unsolicited e-mail, a company representative revealed.

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The lawsuits announced under Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) will be among the first since the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2004, and will target "serial spammers," a Microsoft representative in Europe said.

Microsoft will also discuss plans for its Caller ID e-mail specification, the representative said. The sender authentication technology that aims to thwart the spoofing of e-mail addresses - a common spammer tactic - was talked up by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the RSA security conference in San Francisco last month.

The technical initiative is presumably meant to supplement the antispam efforts being made under Can-Spam.

A press conference on the announcement is being held Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. ET in Washington, D.C. Leading Internet players Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc. (AOL) will be taking part in the announcement, European representatives for each company confirmed.

While the Can-Spam law was lauded by the Internet industry as a good first step at fighting spam, many have said that it does not go far enough to solve the problem. The law requires commercial e-mail to have an opt-out message, allowing recipients to choose not to receive further communications from the sender, bans techniques such as e-mail harvesting and sets out other guidelines on sending commercial e-mail.