Another Successful MAAWG

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

Over the past five years, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meetings have brought together many of the world's experts in email spam, botnets, cybercrime, and related issues. Last week, 270 participants from more than 19 countries met in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands.

Like nearly all computer security conferences, there's a strict policy that information shared within MAAWG is confidential -- so, unlike most marketing conferences, you won't see anyone twittering or blogging the highlights. (We got permission to post this.) A few participants reported on Facebook that there was a fascinating session about "[REDACTED]" (sic), but no other details have been made available. This difference in style shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has spent time with friendly, outgoing marketing conference regulars like our own Stephanie Miller, and with paranoid security and anti-spam experts like...um...I shouldn't mention their names. So if you want to learn what MAAWG's doing, the best option is to review the growing number of published documents.

During the past couple of gatherings, however, a few reporters have been permitted into specific sessions -- always with sufficient notice to the panelists and participants. Here are some of the resulting articles:

• Financial Times: Secret war on web crooks revealed (may require registration)
• PC World: ISPs Report Success in Fighting Malware-infeced PCs
• CIO: Europe Looks to Step Up Fight Against Cybercrime
• Network World: Security group converges to fight Internet abuse

Return Path has been an active member of MAAWG since 2006; Melinda Plemel, George Bilbrey, Alex Rubin, and I spoke in various sessions last week. Though MAAWG doesn't spend much time talking about deliverability, we're very interested in industry collaboration and cooperation towards making the internet -- and, for us, email -- safer and more reliable for everyone who uses it.