Sender ID: What Is It and How Can It Help Fight Spam?

What Is Sender ID

Any email address may get blocked for sending out spam messages, but in some cases, spammers might take hold of your account without your knowledge and use your email address and other information in their own interests. 

There’re many tools for fighting spam, and Sender ID is one of them. It allows you to identify the sender and makes it impossible to fake this information. This tool helps to deal with phishing attacks and other threats based on sending out emails exploiting other people’s names.

How Does the Sender ID Technology Work

Caller ID works as follows: when a provider transmits email traffic through, it labels every email with an IP address used to send the email. The recipient server must check this label against the database. If the IP address isn’t in a blacklist or greylist, the server lets it hit the inbox. Otherwise, the email goes to the spam folder. 

Sender ID identifies the sender and compares the email’s IP address with the domain’s IP address (which is home to the sender’s email address). If the IP addresses coincide, the email goes to the inbox, otherwise, it gets blocked.

Sender ID: Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

Sender ID helps to reduce spam messages. It tracks down senders’ email addresses and stands in the way of undesirable emails. 

Disadvantages 

If senders’ mail servers don’t support the Sender ID function, email messages automatically end up in the spam folder. 

Spammers who have their own mail servers may also be a problem because they can set up SPF or Sender ID. In this case, Sender ID will be useless and the emails will go to spam only if other spam filters detect any threat. 

Let’s Wrap It Up

Sender ID prevents spam distribution and phishing attacks. As a result, mail users are safe: they won’t open hackers’ fake emails, follow dangerous links, and download a virus or other malware.

The main problem is that Sender ID works fine only when lots of mail servers use it. And if an email comes from an email address that doesn’t support Sender ID, it gets blocked.