ISPs band together against spam

A global consortium of ISPs and related vendors has established a working group to find solutions for carrier class spam protection and anti-abuse.

The group, led by Openwave Systems, a messaging software and service provider, represents a total of 80 million subscribers and 40 million e-mail accounts and includes Abranet, Bell Canada, BellSouth, Cox Communications, Internet Initiative Japan, NII Holdings, NTL and TELUS, among other providers.

At an initial meeting held last month in Boston, the group formulated a plan to fight spam including collaborating on cross-operator communications, sharing best practices, developing an ISP code of conduct and establishing a trusted inter-carrier network for messaging.

Another goal is to develop a reference architecture and network standards-based technology to combat spam, including the reduction of spoofing and prevention of identity forgery.

“A lot of the technology that’s out there today is about knocking off the piece of spam right before it hits your inbox,” said Rich Wong, general manager of messaging products at Openwave. “Blocking spam at the network edge, in addition to having good content filtering, we believe is crucial to have the most cost-efficient solution. If you can stop spam before it starts by preventing it from getting into your network, that is the most cost-efficient way to solve this problem.”

Another intention is to build interfaces to key standards and legislative bodies and map out a cohesive point of view on public policy concerning the issue.

“This is an industry problem that we have to collectively solve otherwise it hurts everybody,” Wong said. “Spam is a common enemy of everybody out there in the marketplace. Fundamentally, e-mail is becoming or will become so much more ineffective if we let this spam issue continue to progress in the industry.”

Openwave would like to expand the group to include 75 to 100 global operators, he added. The group will meet in the spring for a summit to discuss progress.

Additionally, the company has set up a web site, www.openwave.com/messaging-anti-abuse-working-group.