Microsoft thinks it knows best how to fight the problem of spam:

If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message.

Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID, he said.

Sender ID is a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail by ensuring the validity of the server from which the e-mail came. While the purpose of curbing junk mail may be laudable, the debate on how to stop the tide of junk mail is still ongoing. According to Microsoft, up to 90 percent of e-mail is spam.

While I'm glad Microsoft wants to help in the fight against spam, any attempt to force widespread adoption of Sender ID will cause more headaches for you and me than for spammers.

Sender ID tags are inserted into email messages by your outgoing mail server. In the case of most consumers, this is a server provided by your ISP. When your message arrives at its destination, the recipient's incoming mail server looks at the address from which you sent the message and the Sender ID of your outgoing mail server. It then looks at a list of approved domains for which your outgoing mail server can send messages to see if your email provider is listed. If there's a match, your message gets through. If not, it's marked as spam.

This is all well and good if your email provider is included in your ISP's list, but there's no guarantee that it will be. If you have multiple email addresses from multiple email providers, and you use a mail client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird to send messages from all of them, you're probably only using your ISP's outgoing mail server to send everything. Thus, if EarthLink is your ISP, but you have a NetZero email address, any mail you send with the NetZero account is actually sent via EarthLink's outgoing mail server. The message never even passes through a NetZero server (unless the recipient has a NetZero address).

This discrepancy exists because most email providers who also sell Internet service only make their outgoing mail servers accessible to users who are also Internet service customers. Hence, if you connect to the Internet via EarthLink, NetZero won't allow you to connect to its outgoing server, even though you have one of the company's email addresses. Meanwhile, EarthLink will allow you to send messages from just about any of your email accounts because you are actually connected to the Internet through its company's service.

What this means is that, unless "netzero.net" (or whatever your email provider's domain happens to be) is listed as an approved domain for EarthLink's outgoing mail server (and it probably isn't), your email address and your outgoing mail server's address will not match. As a result, your email will be considered spam.

But even if your mail provider is approved, your ISP's outgoing mail server still has to support Sender IDs for the process to actually work correctly. Most do not, meaning that, come November, the vast majority of legitimate email sent to Hotmail accounts will automatically be headed for the spam folder.

Of course, Bill Gates isn't going to read that email you sent him anyway, so why should he care that it was automatically forwarded into a rubbish bin?

[CNET News.com] Microsoft pushes spam-filtering technology (via GigaLaw)

The story of a family's fight to see its late son's email is generating a lot of debate this week. U.S. Marine Justin Ellsworth was killed in Iraq last month, and webmail provider Yahoo! is refusing to grant his family access to his account. Yahoo! based its decision on company policy that email accounts and all contents associated with them terminate upon a user's death and that accounts are deleted after 90 days of inactivity. The story took a turn for the absurd today with USA Today reporting that Ellsworth's family has received offers from two hackers to help them break into their son's account. To their credit, the family has expressed no interest in such a course of action, opting instead to seek a resolution with Yahoo!

Those supporting the soldier's family state the importance of protecting history. Comparing the email account to letters written by WWII soldiers, they say the deletion of the email by Yahoo! would amount to the loss of important documents of family history.

As the son of an avid genealogist (and former Marine), I certainly understand a family's desire to obtain any record of their son's life so that it can be preserved and passed down to future generations. As a fallen American soldier, Justin Ellsworth deserves that kind of honor (and then some). But if his family wants a record of his wartime correspondence, they should obtain copies from the recipients of that correspondence.

Access to Ellsworth's email account would give his family access to a lot more than just his war emails. In fact, any emails authored by the soldier himself would only be included in the account if he opted to save his sent messages, an option that is turned off by default in Yahoo! Mail. What family members would be more likely to find are emails sent by others to their son. What about those people's right to privacy? Yahoo! is in no position to weigh the merits of every request it receives to open a deceased user's account. In a time when civil liberties seem to be disposable, a company that truly protects its customers' privacy should be applauded.

Ellsworth's father says that what he really wants access to are the final messages that the soldier didn't get a chance to send before his death. The family is hoping to print out copies of these drafts for inclusion in a scrapbook. Unfortunately, because Ellsworth had not yet sent these messages to anyone, it is arguable that he had not yet waived any expectation of privacy associated with the messages. Furthermore, it's simply not possible to grant access to these messages without compromising the privacy of messages that the family has no entitlement to see. (Unless Yahoo! staffers read all of the account's contents themselves to determine what to release and what to protect; but such a course of action in itself would be an invasion of privacy.)

There's a reason we password protect our accounts: because the contents are private. I love my family very much, but that doesn't necessarily mean I want them sifting through my inbox after I'm gone. In reality, I'd have no problem with them accessing my email accounts, but my ISP shouldn't make that assumption for me. Or anyone else.

What about corporate email accounts? Many people use their email at work for personal correspondence (regardless of their employer's email policies). Should companies be expected to grant network access to a deceased employee's family? I doubt such an expectation would ever garner widespread support. Why, then, should a corporation's right to protect its secrets be any more important than an individual's right to do the same thing?

[CNN.com] Dead Marine's kin plead for e-mail
[USATODAY.com] Marine's family gets e-mail dispute help
[Slashdot.org] Dead? Hope You Left Someone Your Passwords
[iafrica.com] Yahoo blocks dead soldier's emails