Three consumer advocacy organizations have endorsed a technology solution for spam proposed at the FTC Spam Forum in Washington, D.C. last week.
The Coalition Against Unsolicited E-mail (CAUCE), CAUCE Canada and the SpamCon Foundation support the Trusted E-mail Open Standard that allows e-mail senders to make verifiable assertions in the header of a message about their identity and the content of the message.
The technology has been developed and is in use by the ePrivacy Group, a company in Washington, D.C. that develops e-mail privacy and security products.
The header information would give recipients and Internet service providers the information they need to decide whether or not to accept e-mail.
The standard would also include a “seal of approval” in messages, which would certify to consumers that the sender meets specific criteria. Certification programs would be managed by independent authorities, each setting its own criteria, said an e-Privacy Group statement.
“An open standard such as this will benefit the entire international Internet community by creating an environment in which e-mail senders can voluntarily decide to provide trustworthy identification about who they are an what their messages say,” said Laura Atkins, president of SpamCon Foundation, in a statement.
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