Seems like Microsoft wishes to once again push forward its proprietary technologies.From next November its Hotmail and MSN e-mail services will start to tag messages with no Sender-ID as spam.

Sender-ID was proposed to the IETF Marid working group last year by Microsoft. However, the working group refused it because it is covered by a patent. MS was willing to give free access (for how long ?) to its technology to others but the open source community said they was no way they could incorporate this into open source software implementations. As a result, the Marid group disbanded with no agreement.

The Internet is based on open standards. Sender-ID is not. So, from next November, I intend to refuse all mail coming from Hotmail.* and MSN.* and suggest the poor owners of these e-mail addresses to go look elsewhere. After all, there are enough free services available, from Yahoo, Gmail and many others.

Update: it seems the IESG has approved Sender-ID on 24th June. It is not yet clear how the patent issue will be handled.