Alliance Raised Hope in Fight Against Spam

"The Internet has changed from a small town where you can leave your doors unlocked to a big city where you don't even want to talk to some strangers on the street anymore. So when you don't want to know your neighbors you need a way for people to be accountable to each other," said Wong, who co-wrote his e-mail authentication program with Mark Lentczner.

As an advocate of free, open-source software for more than a decade, Wong loathed Microsoft's philosophy of keeping computer code proprietary. He was uneasy about working with the company.

But he thought the e-mail issue was too important to ignore. In May 2004, he met in a locked conference room in a D.C. hotel with three Microsoft engineers. Two more were outside, guarding the door.

In the PC-centric world of the 1980s and early 1990s, Microsoft was a king, a dictator. If something was wrong with its technology or needed to be upgraded, the company simply fixed it in a subsequent version and everyone had no choice but to accept it. The emergence of the Internet, with more than a billion distinct parts owned by governments, companies and individuals, has changed everything. Microsoft can no longer order someone like Wong to use its technology; it has to persuade.

The discussion in the conference room between Wong and Microsoft dragged on, then continued over the next few days at a meeting of e-mail providers in San Jose, on a plane en route to the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters and at an office on the software giant's corporate campus. Finally, they emerged with a compromise

They agreed to merge their e-mail authentication programs into something called Sender ID and to promote it jointly.

Harry Katz, one of the three Microsoft engineers present at the meeting, said that at first he felt "nervousness" and "uncertainty" because previous discussions with authentication providers had gone nowhere. But he left feeling victorious, like that week would go down as a "very important moment" in the evolution of e-mail, he said.

Allman and several other industry heavyweights voiced their support for the project.

The group took its solution to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a standards group made up of volunteers from hundreds of companies, academic institutions and governments. While it has no legal authority to force anyone to accept its decisions, it has great influence.

The computer scientists who were reviewing and tweaking the Wong-Microsoft proposal moved quickly, and by the fall of 2004 they felt they were almost ready to finalize the standard.

Then, as one engineer put it, came the "train wreck."

News broke that Microsoft was trying to patent some of the technology in question. Accusations started to fly on an e-mail discussion group, saying the company had taken advantage of the standards process to promote its corporate interests.