Press Release

Eight Members of the Email Service Provider Coalition to Discuss Email Authentication Standards at FTC Summit

Washington, D.C., November 4, 2004 -- Today, the Email Service Provider Coalition ("ESPC"), comprised of 52 leading email service providers, announced that eight members of the coalition will speak at an Email Authentication Summit sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST").

The ESPC is convinced that spam can be stopped by holding senders accountable for the mail they send and then monitoring their sending practices. Email authentication standards verify senders and are considered the foundation of viable anti-spam strategies. Reputation systems, the other core anti-spam component, assign reputation scores to identify bad senders and take appropriate actions to stop them. By using a combination of authentication standards and reputation systems, the ESPC believes we can put consumers back in control of their inboxes.

The eight speakers presenting at the summit include the executive director of the Email Service Provider Coalition, Trevor Hughes, who stated, "I am pleased to see the FTC and the NIST identify authentication as the next step in the war on spam and we're honored that such a high number of members have been invited to lend their subject-matter knowledge. We are promoting widespread adoption of authentication standards and believe that email authentication is an important step towards more complete technological solutions to spam."

All considered experts in the field of email authentication; a summary of speakers and their panels, include:

Panel: Email Authentication: Real World Effects

• Margaret Olson, chair of the ESPC technology committee; CTO and vice president of architecture, Constant Contact
• Dave Lewis, co-chair of ESPC vendor relations committee; vice president of deliverability management and ISP Relations, Digital Impact
• Fred Lindberg, CTO of CheetahMail, an Experian Company
• Trevor Hughes, executive director, Email Service Provider Coalition
• Robb Wilson, general manager, Quris
  

Panel: Email Authentication Methods: Testing, Implementation and Evaluation

• Bill Karpovich, SVP of marketing and strategy for Port25 Solutions
• David Fowler, director of deliverability and ISP Relations for @Once

Panel: Beyond Email Authentication: The Role of Reputation, Accreditation, Other Spam Tools

• Hans Peter Brøndmo, Digital Impact Fellow

The free two-day email authentication conference is part of a plan devised by the National Do Not Email Registry Report to Congress that focused on important security, enforcement, practical, and technical challenges to finding a solution to the spam problem. It will be held November 9-10, 2004 at the Federal Trade Commission Conference Center in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/e-authentication/index.htm

About the Email Service Provider Coalition:
The Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) was formed in 2002 to fight spam while protecting the delivery of legitimate email. The ESPC is comprised of 52 members including aQuantive, Constant Contact, Digital Impact, DoubleClick, Experian, ProspectivDirect, and SKYLIST. For more information on ESPC, please visit www.espcoalition.org.