Microsoft has published the draft for Sender ID to IETF. It’s a combination of
two standards that are Microsoft Caller ID and SPF of Meng Wong.
What seems to be the point of Sender ID?
SPF prevents domain from being hijacked and tackles the issues of
accreditation, domain reputation and misdirected abuse reports. Sender ID does
the same thing it prevents domain spoofing but it also introduces some new
extensions to the present framework of SMTP to make the mail transaction mare
secure from spoofing. But it won’t stop the spam mails that effectively what
Microsoft desires. I think whole world is infected by spam attack and it is
necessary to bring one consensus on the war against spam. Making clone standard
won’t solve the problem. It is suggested that, Sender ID if adopted should make
a standard of DNS TXT record, existing SPF-Record strings have been published
by many domains but what will happen to those who are SPF clients. They will
have to shift from SPF to Sender ID or else some compatibility is introduced by
Meng Weng Wong for transforming Sender ID E-mail Policy record to SPF-Record
string.
The point of Sender ID is to make one consensus to tackle spam issue. Let’s see
what kind of consensus can be build.
Sender ID publishes TXT records as XML tags. Microsoft is urging whole
industry to start publishing there Sender ID Records.
Sender ID Records are called E-Mail Policy Document, backward
compatibility is also provided for SPF records.
Sender ID suggests the extension to the SMTP protocol, this is how it
is suggested
“To enable receiving servers to identify the purported responsible address
before the message is transmitted, an extension to the SMTP protocol, called
“Responsible Submitter”, has been proposed. Using this extension, sending
e-mail servers would determine the purported responsible address of their own
messages and include this address on a new “SUMBITTER” parameter added to the
“SMTP MAIL” command.”
“That allows an SMTP server to perform this check at the time of the SMTP MAIL
command instead of the SMTP DATA command.”
Is there Need for Sender ID?
Well No, the issues about which Sender ID is about to target are already
handled by SPF. If any extensions that are needed can be made easily to SPF.
This will further slow down the DNS.