October 13, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Internet Light and Power (ilap.com), a facilities-based, multi-tiered, Internet service provider, will be the first Canadian vendor to offer email service enabled with the SenderID specification. The firm will implement the specification throughout their entire mail base on November 1.
The Sender ID framework is an industry standard created to counter email domain spoofing and to provide greater protection against phishing schemes. This combined specification is the result of Microsoft's Caller ID for email proposal, Meng Wong's Sender Policy Framework and a third specification called Submitter Optimization.
The Sender ID specification works to verify that each email message originates from the Internet domain from which it claims to come, based on the sender's server IP address. Eliminating domain spoofing will help legitimate senders protect their domain names and reputations, and help recipients more effectively identify and filter junk email and phishing scams.
"We are implementing Sender ID so that our corporate clients don't have to worry about their trademarks being infringed," says Tristan Goguen, president of Internet Light and Power. "Further, with Sender ID, our recipients can be assured that all their in-bound email is coming from a legitimate source."
Goguen is excited about the technology because of its capacity to limit spoofing and phishing schemes that are used for criminal activity. Phishing scams involve email purportedly from a recipient's bank, credit card company or Internet provider requesting sensitive information such as "lost" credit card numbers or passwords requiring confirmation. Spammers often spoof or forge their return addresses to make them look legitimate to recipients' spam filters. This can deceive recipients into opening the unwanted mail, because it appears to be from a known contact. The technique also assists in the spread of email viruses.
"Any technology that systematically identifies the mail source is great because users need not do any thing to stop fraudulent mail," says Goguen. "The recipient system will simply ignore the message and thereby reduce the amount of decisions a recipient will need to make concerning deleting unwanted mail."
Internet Light and Power is implementing the specification to supplement its existing anti-spam technology. With the firm's iPermitMail service, which was launched last year, users have complete control over their inboxes.
Unlike most anti-spam programs, which use blacklists or filters, iPermitMail is a permission-based email system that compares each email received against a permitted sender database and either holds the message or forwards it to the user's inbox. This results in zero false positives, a very high spam blocking percentage, and low maintenance requirements, says the company.
iPermitMail combines its "white list", which ensures that important clients and other contacts will not be blocked, with iPermitMail's patent-pending adaptive inheritance technology. This allows users to inherit the permission databases of other iPermitMail users, which significantly lowers the numbers of legitimate users that need to be added to individual lists. According to Internet Light and Power, the iPermitMail system blocked a high percentage of all spam.
"With the ILAP mail platform, in excess of 99 percent of spam is stopped," says Goguen. "With the addition of Sender ID, we expect that our system will be able to stop all spam – 100 percent of it – since the major problem in the past was authentication."
Consumers can purchase a single iPermitMail account for $3.75 per month. Service providers can purchase multiple accounts in high volume for $2.25 per month. The iPermitMail service will be enabled with the Sender ID specification in November.
