He wears a cowboy hat and runs a Philadelphia-based e-mail and Web service.
"But that's just my day job," explained Meng Weng Wong, a '97 graduate of Penn's School of Engineering.
By night, Wong is an anti-spam e-mail crusader, developing and implementing new filtering technologies.
"I think it is possible to solve spam using only technological means as opposed to legal, political and economic means," he said.
Wong's latest undertaking is SPF or "Sender Permitted From."
"I chose the acronym before I chose the name," Wong said. "It functions like sunscreen and only lets in legitimate mail."
SPF blocks mail sent via forged e-mail accounts, which spammers often employ in an effort to get their messages past traditional Webmail filtering systems.
SPF works by determining whether mail sent from a given address has been forged.
Every e-mail provider has a specific set of machines -- known as "mx" machines -- through which it sends each individual e-mail. These machines encode each sent message with a number.
Wong's program works on a receiver's computer to match the number encoded in the sent e-mail to the number of the original sender's service provider.
So, if a piece of spam claims to be from a certain provider or domain, but the codes in the e-mail do not match the codes registered in the program, the SPF filter recognizes the e-mail as spam.
"Think of it as e-mail caller ID," Wong said. He developed SPF as a hybrid formed from two existing spam filters. Wong said that the concept is not a new one.
"This idea has been around for a long time, but I decided to get behind it, popularize it and show it off to people." Now he travels to spam conferences around the country in an effort to get the word out about SPF.
The new filter is free, and Wong hopes that this will attract enough domains to make it as widespread an effort as possible. Since Dec. 15, America Online, AltaVista and several other domains have signed on, giving Wong hope of fully implementing SPF by the summer.
Still, there are potential roadblocks ahead.
"He's going to have a tough time convincing people to add this new filter" to their computer networks, said Director of Computing and Educational Services Helen Anderson. "Still, I think it's wonderful that he's working to eliminate spam."
Anderson said she has received 408 spam messages in the last five days. Five e-mails made it past the two filters she currently uses.
Erich Schneider, assistant administrator of Information Technology Services at the California Institute of Technology, is also skeptical of SPF.
"It's not entirely clear how Wong is going to get over the barrier of universal adoption," he said.
"The difficulty with some of these schemes is that it doesn't really work well unless everyone does it."
Still, Wong remains confident that SPF will become popular on a large scale because it is free. "Some people say that this year, anti-spam will be a $1 billion industry," he said. "Many people want to take advantage, but the reason I'm not trying to make money off of it is so that it can actually work."
Wong is quick to add that SPF is "not a complete solution." It works best when used in conjunction with other anti-spam filters. Nonetheless, said Wong, "it would be the first step."
