Secure email specs could merge

After submitting its Caller ID email authentication specification to a standards body, Microsoft is discussing merging its spec with another, called sender policy framework, or SPF. Email experts from Microsoft will spend a weekend meeting with SPF author Meng Weng Wong of Pobox.com, looking for ways to merge the closely-related Caller ID and SPF standards, according to Wong. "Basically, we're going to take SPF and Caller-ID and do a 'cut and paste,'" Wong said Friday, en route to Microsoft headquarters.

Microsoft unveiled its plans at its recent RSA data security conference, in a keynote by Bill Gates. Caller ID makes it harder to doctor unsolicited commercial email, or spam, so it appears to come from legitimate Web domains. Microsoft submitted Caller ID to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) earlier this week.

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