IBM has announced a prototype anti-spam technology that it claims is eliminating 99 percent of incoming spam in lab tests. The software, FairUCE (Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail), looks at the identity of the e-mail sender, as opposed to the more common technique of filtering spam by analyzing the content of e-mails.
FairUCE sits on your e-mail server and works by looking at the e-mail address, domain and originating computer. This "identity management" approach to spam links the inbound e-mail back to its original Internet Protocol (IP) address using lookup databases provided by the sending domain, and by referring to caches of IP information held locally. The sender domain identity and related information are the only things considered.
The technology is similar to other authentication schemes, notably Microsoft's Sender ID and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), formerly known as Sender Permitted From. The key difference is that these solutions require each domain to publish lists of authorized domains, whereas FairUCE uses existing domain information to create its own "reputation" rating.