The apparently unnamed alliance, announced by the three online giants a month ago, hopes to develop standard technical means to make the lives of spammers more difficult.
AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft said in April they are working on ways, for example, to stop people creating large quantities of email accounts for spamming, to close open relays, to verify email header information, and to preserve evidence of spam attacks.
It also gives the companies the appearance of fighting the spam problem, even as AOL and Microsoft lobby for federal legislation that would do little to end consumer headaches while preserving the right of marketers to send spam.
EarthLink also yesterday launched spamBlocker, a optional service for its subscribers that invokes a permission-based auto-response to spam and unrecognized email addresses in order to provide a de facto white-list of approved email senders.
In its publicity yesterday, the ISP avoided using the term challenge-response, which had been used in previous reports, possibly because it is being sued by MailBlocks Inc, a startup email provider that owns patents on challenge-response.
An EarthLink spokesperson could not be reached to comment on the lawsuit, the spamBlocker service, or the alliance with Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, by press time yesterday. The company has previously said it does not infringe the patents.
Phil Goldman, CEO of MailBlocks, told ComputerWire yesterday that as far as he could tell, EarthLink had not changed the underlying technology behind of the service since it pre-announced it in a newspaper article in early May.
They haven’t appeared to change it, and we feel we have a very strong case, Goldman said. He added that MailBlocks’ request to have spamBlocker blocked has yet to be heard by a judge, but that a hearing could happen as early as today.
Goldman also dismissed several claims in online forums that prior art has been found that predates his patents. We’ve investigated several of them and found no examples of prior art we think would invalidate our patents in any way, he said.
Source: Computerwire
