Wireless ISPs make preemptive spam strike

Wireline and wireless companies joined forces on Wednesday as an ISP Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group to develop methods to shut down spammers before they appear on the networks.

The founding members include Bell Canada, Bell South, Cox, Internet Initiative Japan, NII Holdings and Openwave Systems, among others.

"The fire is raging in the wireline world as you look at your inbox. In the degree that we can preempt the fire in the wireless world, we will do that," said Rich Wong, general manager at Openwave, a wireless infrastructure provider.

The group plans to build a so-called "neighborhood watch" which will gather information about spammers, create a standard architecture and technology to stop spam before it filters into the networks of  ISPs, wireless carriers or cable modem providers, and attempt to influence public policy.

"We want to move from filtering only to stopping spam at the network edge," Wong said.

While monitoring and influencing legislation is important, Wong said that the recent legislation, the "canned spam" act he called it, did nothing to reduce the amount of spam emails users receive.

The group will also develop an ISP code of conduct, a trusted inter-carrier network for messaging and the creation of best practices to prevent spam, denial-of-service attacks, virus and any other undesired content.

"Spammers are united, we need to do the same thing," said Nick Jacobs, director of data services at NII Holdings .