The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) recently released a policy proposal in an effort to fight the scourge of spam.

The proposal provides recommended actions and policies for Internet service providers (ISPs) and e-mail service providers as well as large senders of e-mail including governments, private corporations and online marketing organizations. These recommendations primarily focus on two key issues: helping solve the e-mail forgery problem by eliminating domain spoofing through Internet Protocol-based and signature-based solutions; and best practices to help prevent ISPs and their customers from being sources of spam.

ASTA was founded in April 2003 to bring together key industry stakeholders to drive technical standards and promote collaboration in the development of industry guidelines to address the spam problem. Current members include America Online, British Telecom, Comcast, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo!.