The Email Wars

IronPort Bonded Sender Program looks more like a protection racket than solid anti-spam technology

With great fanfare and plenty of headlines, MSN and Hotmail have joined the IronPort Bonded Sender Program, a scheme that requires companies to post a bond before being allowed to send email. The program is rather expensive to get into, putting it far out of the reach of legitimate email marketers, small businesses and non-profits that don’t have deep pockets. The whole thing smacks of an inside job: IronPort’s CEO is a former employee of both Hotmail and MSN, for one thing. It also looks more like a way to extract dollars from businesses rather than really solve the spam problem: money posted by businesses who want to participate goes directly to — guess who? — IronPort.

The message sounds like a protection racket: pay us or your email might get caught in the spam filters at Hotmail and MSN. Yet the whole scheme does absolutely nothing to stop spammers from sending email in the first place, so it’s not really a solution for stopping spam at all. As Ray Everett-Church (from the counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) says, the IronPort system is really just a way to let people buy their way into inboxes rather than getting customer permission. And that’s bad news for everyone.

Legitimate email delivery needs to remain available to universities, non-profits, and organizations from poor countries who simply can’t afford the fees demanded by IronPort. The Bonded Sender Program discriminates based on economic status: poor organizations can’t afford the fees. In addition, the idea of one company controlling the whole system is undemocratic and goes against the free spirit of the Internet. We don’t need another Network Solutions fiasco. For these reasons and many others, I believe the Bonded Sender Program is bad for the Internet: it is unfair, undemocratic, and ineffective in stopping spam. A much better solution is the puzzle solution proposed by Microsoft, which will very likely make the Bonded Sender Program obsolete.