In contrast, current standards-based efforts to establish a sender authentication standard using digital certificates to as domain keys to generate digital signatures for messages can be employed by all enterprises, rather than exclusively by senders of bulk commercial email.

New standards, however, will take several years to become incorporated in a majority of Internet MTAs. It is likely that third-generation anti-spam technologies will persist as a permanent feature of the messaging landscape.

In coming months, we'll take a look at the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, a group lead by Microsoft and several major ISPs including AOL, Comcast, Yahoo!, Earthlink, and British Telecom. Microsoft's Microsoft's proposed CallerID approach and the Sender Profile Framework proposed by anti-spam researcher Meng Wong are two components of what will certainly become a new anti-spam Internet standard.

Andrew Stuart is a software designer, consultant and Lotus Domino programmer and has been working with computers for 16 years. Andrew is Managing Director of Touchdown Systems Design in Melbourne Australia at http://www.touchdown.com.au. He can be reached at astuart@mira.net.