BBC: Microsoft's spam plan rejected

Microsoft's stated intent to hold on to some intellectual property behind its Sender ID program caused a standards body to reject it as a potential universal means of determining email senders' identities. Using proprietary technology flouts the policies of many open source projects, meaning that many major technology components couldn't adopt Sender ID, even if the internet standards body accepted it. Microsoft now faces a choice of either opening up its Sender ID, loosing it to the public domain, or going ahead, as it's done in the past, creating a de facto proprietary standard.