Many of the other companies and industry groups followed suit. The E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition -- formerly known as the E-mail Service Provider Coalition -- issued a report showing "rapid adoption of authentication standards by 18 of the nation's largest Internet Service Providers," including AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The company also issued a document providing "guiding principles of e-mail reputation" and "a framework for public and private reputation services."

Enterprise messaging company StrongMail offered its own whitepaper "E-mail Authentication: The Time is Now" and a paper on "The Do's and Don'ts of E-mail Authentication."

Despite the good cheer, the e-mail authentication landscape is still as hopelessly crowded as it was a year ago, said Meng Wong, a messaging authentication expert who developed the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) standard, which later merged with a competing Microsoft architecture called Caller ID to become part of the Sender ID framework.

"One of the big mistakes in authentication was too many cooks in the kitchen," Wong said.

The industry managed to boil SPF, Caller ID, Domain Keys and IIM down to just two authentication schemes: Sender ID and DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, Wong said.