I was digging through my closet today and found this hat. The hats were given out as chachka at a unique email industry meetup hosted by the Berkman Center at Harvard University on a very cold winter day in January, 2004. I think Trevor Hughes was responsible for the hats.
I believe this meeting was one of the first times that SPF, Sender-ID and Domain Keys were revealed publicly. I remember Hans Peter Brøndmo speaking about the vision of Project Lumos a lot of passionate debate about the future of email and the need for Authentication, Accreditation and Reputation systems.
My how far we've come! 6 years later SPF is gone, Sender-ID is predominantly used by Microsoft, and DKIM has been adopted by Google, Yahoo! and many others. Authentication is real. Return Path is the de-facto reputation system and also provides accreditation services along with Goodmail and others.
Back then all reputation was IP based. Now we're finally seeing significant movement towards domain based reputation authenticated with DKIM.
Did it "solve" the spam problem? Certainly not. I do think it has helped the overall ecosystem and it surely has made it easier for legitimate senders to get reliably email deliverability.
Were you at that meeting on the cold January day in 2004? What do you remember? What do you think about how far we've come?




Can you elaborate further on your statement that "SPF is gone"?
Posted by: Tony Patti | February 08, 2010 at 10:53 PM
I do think it has helped the overall ecosystem and it surely has made it easier for legitimate senders to get reliably email deliverability.
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