AOL Signs Off From Sender ID

America Online has decided not to fully support Microsoft's Sender ID spam-fighting plan after the Internet Engineering Task Force and the open-source community expressed intellectual property concerns. "AOL will now not be moving forward with full deployment of the Sender ID protocol," spokesman Nicholas Graham said in a statement sent via e-mail Thursday. Instead, the Dulles, Virginia-based Internet service provider will support only the Sender Policy Framework to fight spam by verifying the source of e-mail sent to its users, he said.

AOL's rejection comes a week after an IETF group considering Sender ID as a standard said the proposal needed rewriting. Earlier this month, the open-source groups Apache Software Foundation and Debian Project dismissed Sender ID because the license would prevent them from supporting the technology. AOL is concerned about the lack of acceptance for Sender ID in the open-source community, Graham said. Additionally, the ISP is afraid that recent changes to Sender ID will make it incompatible with the original SPF specification, he said. AOL had endorsed Sender ID when it was submitted to the IETF in June.

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