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San Francisco, Nov. 27, 2007 – A summary of the most effective abuse desk best practices from MAAWG service providers was compiled for general industry use at the latest Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group members-only meeting. The three-day working conference also featured a keynote address from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission chairman, joint-working sessions with cooperating international anti-spam organizations, and progress on recommended email authentication practices.

The meeting held last month in Washington, D.C., brought together almost 250 MAAWG members and 70 participants from the LAP (London Action Plan) and CNSA (the EU Contact Network of Spam Authorities created by the European Commission) representing over 20 countries. Significant progress on collaborative and technical measures to combat online abuse globally was made during the 21 sessions held Oct. 8-10, including:

• A summary of the best abuse desk procedures was compiled from MAAWG member ISPs and email providers and is now available to the industry. The MAAWG Abuse Desk Common Practices provides insight into the processes that have proven most effective in educating customers, reducing email abuse problems, and developing knowledgeable abuse desk employees. It can be downloaded at the organization’s Web site www.MAAWG.org.

• Work continued on an email authentication white paper edited by David Crocker, MAAWG senior technical advisor and principal with Brandenburg InternetWorking. MAAWG sees authentication as an important technology to reduce spam and phishing emails. The paper will offer a basic introduction to email authentication for management staff and then discuss technical concepts and choices in more details for software developers and network engineers.

• A new subcommittee was created focusing on email forwarding issues to be chaired by Jay Opperman of Comcast. The group will create a best practices document which will include recommendations and guidelines for filtering, authentication and reputation policies to increase the quality of mail delivered to the end recipient.
• The MAAWG Technical Committee began work on defining reputation management terms. This is the first step in creating an industry-wide dialogue on generally accepted practices to measure senders’ reputations and improve deliverability of “false positive” emails. Mike Adkins of AOL, Pat Petersen of Ironport Systems, and Chris Roosenraad of Time Warner Cable also were elected MAAWG Technical Committee co-chairs.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras announced in her Oct. 10 speech at the meeting the first law enforcement action in which the FTC employed the U.S. SAFE WEB Act to share information with foreign partners resulting in a temporary restraining order against the principals behind an international spamming enterprise that fraudulently marketed anti-aging and weight loss products. The LAP (www.londonactionplan.com) and CNSA with MAAWG and held special training and other conference sessions for their members.

The second quarter 2007 MAAWG Email Metrics Report was reviewed and has been released since the meeting. This quarterly report is compiled by ISP and email service provider members to help the industry understand the current volume of abusive email and spot trends. A training session on the new MAAWG Abuse Contact Database that allows members direct communications with each other to address reputation and abuse issues also was held at the meeting.

MAAWG has scheduled three meetings next year, with activities continuing in its technical, collaboration and public policy committees between the events. The 2008 February meeting in San Francisco, June meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, and September meeting in Miami, Florida, are open to members only. Information on the organization and future meetings is available at www.MAAWG.org.