All agree that SMTP needs some lipstick… a way to prevent a spammer from pretending to be you. Meng Wong of pobox.com and dyndns, open sourced SPF, a way to do it with lightly modified DNS recs.

Others saw a chance to own the lipstick market. Bullied folks into using their proprietary methods or signing-on to their draconian licensing schemes.

AOL saw Wong’s light. Yahoo teamed with sendmail to push its DomainKeys. Microsoft championed its own (of course) Caller-ID.

Suddenly, it seems, Redmond sees Wong’s light, too. A public relations ploy? A chance to stick it to Yahoo?

Or did Microsoft simply decide that two Wongs make a light?