Heavyweights meet to chew over Spam

By Mark Chillingworth

Industry titans from the Internet and computing markets have met in the United States to discuss how to tackle the growing spam problem. A special meeting hosted by technology information company CNET Networks saw AOL Time Warner, Dell, DoubleClick, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo discuss possible authentication standards.

The San Francisco meeting is the second this year of the industry heavyweights, who believe that spam is holding back the Internet's adoption.

"I think people are recognising that the last thing we want is for people to stop using email," said Peter Coroneos, the chief executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) in Australia. He added, "We support all forms of effort to stop this, spam is a major issue and one we are also taking seriously."

The meeting, dubbed SpamJam, is looking to discuss the development of a standard for authentication, which will allow legitimate messages to be recognised by email servers and delivered to the recipient.

Mr Coroneos said an Australian initiative will be announced next month, which the IIA has developed in conjunction with the Australian Internet industry and has worked closely with the government with in development. He said the Federal government is due to make an announcement on tacking spam soon as well and both announcements could possibly be linked.

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