Step one of many (Score 2, Insightful)

In my mind, Sender ID and SPF have nothing to do directly with spam. They are designed to combat fraudulant e-mail headers, nothing more.

Granted, almost all of the current spam has fraudulant headers, but if Sender ID and SPF catch on, that will gradually change. Spam will simply be tagged with the correct relay.

One could say that illegal spam will be easier to track down, but that isn't really true... you can track spam with excellant accuracy today by following the linkage to the company selling the products. That linkage has to be accurate, or there is no profit to be had.

You could also say that spam will be easier to blacklist, but I don't think that is true either. Simple shifts in the spammers' methodologies, such as rotating their DNS names, would suffice to get around blacklists.

What we really need to combat spam is better e-mail management tools. The reason we get unwanted e-mail is because the sender has control, not the individual or company. That needs to change.

Would a large company allow a random outside person walk into their building, go to anybody's cube, and start talking? Never, but that's what happens electronically today with e-mail.

Instead of today's simplistic systems, imagine a multi-tier system of contacts -- a top level of corporate maintained partners and customers, a mid level of department specific contacts, and a bottom tier of personal contacts and exceptions.

This contact list would be paired with a routing system based on well-defined business rules. As companies regain control, the From will become far more important than the To.

But sophisticated management depends on clean data, and clean data is exactly what today's e-mail isn't.

The more checks we can add into the process to validate the headers, the better the tools can become, and the sooner unwanted e-mail will become a thing of the past.