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Three of the world's leading e-mail providers have joined together to announce their intentions to reduce the amount of spam faced by e-mail users, much of which comes from e-mail addresses set up through participating companies America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

The group will work to reduce the amount of junk e-mail received by their users and to identify ways to limit the amount of spam originating from their own e-mail services, they said in a statement Monday. This effort will include the identification of suspicious e-mail headers, better feedback options for consumers across the different e-mail service providers, and closer cooperation with law enforcement authorities.

Other groups including other e-mail service providers and antispam organizations will be invited to join the initiative, said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesperson. "Spam isn't just a U.S. problem, it's a global menace. The only way we're going to make progress is with key voices at the table," he said.

The three companies hope to prevent spammers from using e-mail headers that distort their identities, and to prevent e-mail sent from open relays or open proxies, they said. Spammers often use these open relays to send spam e-mail around networks that carries the origination address of an innocent e-mail account, said Brian Arbogast, a vice president in Microsoft's MSN division.

Searching for the Source

Quite a bit of spam comes from users of the three companies' popular free e-mail services, and the companies want to reduce that amount by making it harder to register fraudulent e-mail addresses in bulk. The group also will create better feedback policies and procedures for their customers that can help identify spam-generating businesses or e-mail addresses.

Stopping short of entering the opt-in/opt-out debate, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo said they will work with e-mail marketers to help consumers better recognize legitimate e-mail as opposed to unsolicited marketing messages. Fed up with incessant pitches from fake Nigerian widows, many consumer groups are lobbying for a national opt-in policy, under which any business that wishes to send commercial e-mail must get explicit permission from the recipient before sending the e-mail. Thus far, the more business-friendly opt-out standard has applied, where legitimate e-mail marketers must provide a valid address for the recipient to remove themselves from that hit list.

"We haven't taken a position as a group on policy-related issues, but it's important to engage a broad number of stakeholders to work on the problem," said Lisa Pollock Mann, senior director of messaging products at Yahoo.

The debate between opt-in/opt-out only applies to legitimate senders of marketing messages, rather than distributors of e-mail promoting pornography, weight-loss supplements, or the aforementioned Nigerian bank-account scam offers, which have a frighteningly high success rate.

Canning Spam

Many organizations are looking for a way to combat spam, which researcher MessageLabs said makes up 30 percent of all e-mail, a figure it expects to reach 50 percent by July. A recent spam conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology underlined the difficulty of the problem. Since everyone has a slightly different idea of what constitutes spam, universal spam filters often block legitimate--and important--e-mail messages from reaching their destination.

The Internet Engineering Task Force feels that spam blocking needs to start at the Internet service provider level, and created the Anti-Spam Research Group to identify ways to create an architecture that allows Internet users to indicate their willingness to receive unsolicited e-mail.

The U.S. government is also getting involved. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently sought a court order against a spammer who used deceptive subject headers to promote a pornography Web site, and two U.S. senators have re-introduced an antispam bill that never made it to the Senate floor for a full vote last year. The bill seeks to fine spammers who "willingly and knowingly" fail to include opt-out e-mail addresses.

"The group will have a real focus on supporting legislation, especially on antifraud and antiharvesting legislation," Microsoft's Arbogast said. Harvesting is a practice where spam generators use software to collect e-mail addresses from places like Web site guestbooks, Internet newsgroups, or other places where a user lists their e-mail address.

The recognition by the e-mail providers that spam is growing out of control will only help their customers, but it remains to be seen how effective the companies will be against determined spammers, said Michael Gartenberg, research director for Jupiter Research in New York.

"People who send spam know the response rate isn't high, but there is a response rate. This will help, but they're never going to block everything," he said.