Openwave, MTA provider to the carriers, is building an anti-spam working group for ISPs, starting with large carriers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 11, 2004]

Like most movements, this one started with a conference. During September 23 to 25, 2003, in Santa Barbara, California, the Openwave Messaging Anti-Abuse Conference 2003 met. Sponsors were HP, IBM, Cloudmark, Brightmail, MX Logic, Corvigo, and McAfee.

Featured keynotes were delivered by Lawrence Lessig and the FTC's Eileen Harrington.

Service provider attendees came from carriers worldwide including Bell South (U.S.), Bell Canada (Canada), TeliaSonera (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), Sprint (U.S.), Cingular (U.S.), and J-PHONE (Japan).

Out of this elite group of speakers and attendees, an association was born, the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG, which is entertainingly difficult to pronounce).

The association's website is currently hosted by Openwave, a vendor of MTA and anti-spam products to the carriers of the world.

The idea of the group is to bring together technology, the law, and the ISPs, in a coalition to fight spam. Of course, this is not the only such group.

David Staas, senior product marketing manager at Openwave, says, "this is a service provider-led, service provider-driven forum to address service provider needs and issues."

Initially, the association simply plans to draft a code of conduct for service providers, and build a trade show (the next meeting is May 18 to 19 in Washington, D.C.).

The code of conduct is intended to enable large carriers to trust each others' traffic, reducing the amount of scanning carriers have to perform on such trusted traffic.

Of course, numerous anti-spam ideas and solutions are being touted. Only time will tell whether this association, one of many anti-spam associations and ideas, contributes to the cure.

— End