WASHINGTON DC - November 10, 2004 - More than 35 industry vendors comprising end-user, email service provider, and anti-spam technology companies delivered a letter to the Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) this week expressing that they intend to work together to step up anti-spam, anti-phishing efforts by supporting key email-authentication technologies including the Cisco Identified Internet Mail specification.

The vendors and users delivered the letter in prelude to the FTC and NIST's Email Authentication Summit, which is being held in Washington DC on Nov. 9 and 10. In the letter, the participating vendors and users stated that they would work "together to lead the adoption of email authentication technologies," that path-based and signature-based approaches were complementary, and that successful deployment of email authentication would be achieved by "incorporating multiple approaches and technologies" to address the ranges of platforms, user environments and deployment requirements worldwide. In support of this the vendors and users said they would publish path-based records and advance signature-based technologies such as Cisco's Identified Internet Mail. The full draft of the letter can be viewed at http://www.truste.org/about/sender_id_industry_letter.php.

"The support from these companies is a milestone achievement for Cisco Identified Internet Mail as an anti-spam, anti-phishing technology," said Dave Rossetti, a vice president at Cisco and the head of the Cisco Technology Center. "Our approach with Identified Internet Mail has been to work to ensure it is backwards-compatible with and preserves the positive aspects of today's email infrastructure including the privacy of users and the ability for a user to send email to any other user. We are working with the industry to develop and deploy effective solutions to email fraud."

As part of its commitment to the widespread adoption of Identified Internet Mail, Cisco submitted an updated version of the proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in October 2004. Cisco also released an open-source implementation of the proposal to allow customers and the software developer community to download and contribute to further innovations in the technology. And, a number of key enterprises and Internet service providers are planning to trial Identified Internet Mail as part of their solution against spam and phishing.

About Cisco Identified Internet Mail

Cisco Identified Internet Mail is a signature-based message authentication solution to address Internet spam and email fraud such as phishing attacks. The solution is designed to help identify fraudulent messages and apply user-defined policies depending on the outcome of the message verification process. Identified Internet Mail is backwards compatible with and preserves the positive aspects of today's email infrastructure including the privacy of email users and the ability for a user to send email to any other user. For more information, go to http://www.identifiedmail.com/