PRESS RELEASE

X-ASVP Committee Publishes Anti-spam Protocol Proposal

SACRAMENTO (July 7, 2007)

Drastically reducing spam throughout the internet is the goal of a new idea submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a working group of the Internet Society that adopts internet standards.

Spam is unsolicited or undesired bulk e-mail -- the electronic equivalent of "postage-due" junk mail. An estimated 55 billion e-mail spam were sent each day in June 2006, an increase of 25 billion per day from June 2005, according to industry research.

The X-ASVP (eXtensible Anti-spam Verification Protocol) controlling committee seeks public comment on its proposal to leverage existing internet protocols in a new global infrastructure.

"If implemented, spam would be drastically reduced," said Gerald Klaas, CISSP, chair of the group who developed the new protocol. "This would create a predictable method for exchanging authentication information."

X-ASVP protocol is named after the supplemental header it would add to Internet mail messages. The proposed header would include the necessary information that an e-mail recipient has announced they require to get past their e-mail filters. This "meta-document" information would be posted on a web server.

"X-ASVP is a method for enabling peer to peer scalable authentication between holders of an internet e-mail address, with redundancy and reliability provided by secondary and global providers," Klaas said.

For further information about the X-ASVP protocol proposal, go to http://www.x-asvp.org .

The new protocol proposal organization is a non-profit, non-governmental, international, professional membership group working to build, support and encourage the use of X-ASVP and the common infrastructure required for reliability, redundancy, and universality.