Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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There is a LOT of FUD about Sender ID. I was happy to read this Forbes Article which does a great job at explaining the current situation around "email authentication" which basically means technologies such as Sender ID and Domain Keys.
The IETF has not yet endorsed either specification as an industry standard, but e-mail authentication is a hotly debated topic in the industry. Because the authentication approaches are different, system administrators do not have to choose which specification to follow--they can use both simultaneously. Tripp Cox, chief technology officer of Internet service provider EarthLink has been testing both and says of the two proposals, “We found they are complimentary technologies, but doing different things.”
As Tripp said, these technologies are complementary. You can use both, and the work in concert to deliver different but valuable information about the origins of the email.
Sender ID does have some drawbacks, most notably if you forward mail from one account to another (such as from a university alumni account to hotmail) you can get a false positive. However, these things can be mitigated. To be fair, Sender ID does work well at identifying fraudulent fishing mail. eBay and Paypal both benefit from this.
As a reminder, you can read all about our anti-spam efforts here.