Carl Hutzler's Blog

A ways back in March of 2004, I worked with a number of bright people in the Internet and email communities on an anti-spam document. We attempted to explain how some fairly simple operational and architectural changes to the way email is submitted and transferred across the global mail infrastructure could provide better tracking and identification of the senders of bad email once it had been sent. This would, in-turn, better help show who was to blame for the problems. No, it would not identify the actual spammer directly, but these recommendations would help ensure that responsibility for the issue was handled by the correct “responsible party” instead of the big ISP getting blamed for blocking the little hosting company’s mail (now you know where I was coming from :-)

Anyway, we did not have any grandiose ideas that our thinking was cutting edge, new, or would stop spam on its own. But we wanted to document a number of best practices for network and email security that we felt would greatly benefit all internet users if ISPs would implement them. To that end, we wrote a document called Email Submission Between Independent Networks.

We submitted it to the RFC community and have received many informed comments and revised it several times. Thanks to the tremendous help of David Crocker, the grandfather of Internet mail (yes, look for his name in some sort of SMTP standard or something :-) we are finally to the point where it is approved as a Best Common Practice (sort of a mini RFC).

Anyway, I am proud to have worked with these folks and to be able to contribute a little something to the great Internet we find so valuable in our everyday lives.

Thank you to:

David Crocker of Brandenburg Internetworking
Pete Resnick of Qualcomm, Inc.
Robert Sanders of Earthlink
Eric Allman of Sendmail, Inc.
Tony Finch of the University of Cambridge

And might I say, Woo (explicative deleted) Hoo!