Microsoft's attitude of taking severe measures against spam instead of standing-by or waiting for a commonly-agreed solution to be reached can be criticized, but let's not forget that spam is taking such epic proportions that is threatening the very existence of e-mail.

And after all, Hotmail is Microsoft's service, so if the company believes that Sender ID is the best solution for the company, then it has all the right to do as it pleases, taking full responsibility for the annoyance it would cause to some of its users.

Sender ID could prove to be a messianic solution for the entire online direct marketing industry. Whether we like or not, this industry has proved its efficiency many times despite being suffocated by spam or having to employ high costs in order to deal with the supplementary spam filters.

Sender ID is the answer given by Microsoft to the spam problem and let's not forget that other companies also use their proprietary solutions to fight spam, like for instance Yahoo!'s DomainKeys.

And considering that Sender ID will start blocking the e-mails that don't comply to its rules towards the end of 2005, we will see then how efficient this technology is. Until then ... shhh ... Microsoft is working!