Spam and Standards-Groups Coordination

ChevronTexaco spends a lot of money trying to cope with spam coming into
our mail server.  In addition we view spam as a threat to the entire
Web.  And we are individually and personally affected by spam -- that
is, it really makes us grumpy.  All these factors mean that we feel we
are stakeholders in the spam problem.

Recently efforts like SPF and Sender ID seem to show some promise for
helping the situation.  We have implemented both in an experimental mode
but we are still evaluating how effective these techniques might be for
us in production.  The effectiveness of both seem to depend on whether
the techniques are widely accepted.  We would not mind at the least
getting some guidance on this from groups like the W3C and IETF.
Moreover, we need products from vendors that will help with the problem,
and it seems to us vendors are not going to build anything unless the
landscape is fairly clear -- we need standards and consensus on those
standards so that we can expect to purchase products that build to those
standards.  We probably need a few such standards that are more or less
endorsed or understood to be effective, not twenty or thirty that result
in a morass of confusion.

We view this as a serious problem and we would like to see organizations
like the W3C and IETF helping with it.  We are less interested in whose
turf it is than that the issues get addressed.