Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group

The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) is an international information technology industry forum that works to reduce the threat from bots, malware, spam, viruses, DoS attacks and other online exploitations. It is one of the largest global organizations working against all forms of messaging abuse and represents over a billion mailboxes among its global membership.

It started as a group of internet service providers, mobile network operators, telecommunications companies and infrastructure vendors, and anti-spam technology vendors in early 2004 to fight spam and help protect end-users. In the spirit of collaboration, it expanded to include email service providers and vetted parties interested in safeguarding the online ecosystem. The organization initially started as MAAWG, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, but as spam morphed into a widely recognized vector for spreading malware and other threats, the organization changed its name to the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group in 2012 to better reflect its scope of work. In the digital world today, spam is just the symptom; malware and botnets are the real pathology.

M3AAWG has three levels of membership:

As of August 2015, the M3AAWG Board of Directors includes AT&T (NYSE: T); CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL); Cloudmark, Inc.; Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA); Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT); Cox Communications; Damballa, Inc.; Facebook; Google; LinkedIn; Listrak; Mailchimp; Message Systems; Orange (NYSE and Euronext: ORA); OVH; Return Path; Time Warner Cable; Verizon Communications; and Yahoo! Inc.

The role of M3AAWG is to bring various aspects of the industry together to discuss related anti-abuse issues and, based on this cooperative effort, produce best practices, public policy comments, white papers and other materials that are available to the industry from the M3AAWG website. It also provides an opportunity for professionals to share abuse information and their experience with their peers.

M3AAWG has 36 papers and best practices on a variety of topics as of August 2015, with new documents addressing evolving threats and issues consistently in development. Among the currently available published best practices is a document to help hosting service providers prevent abuse that was jointly published with the i2Coalition, anti-abuse recommendations for messaging service providers, best practices for high-volume email marketing senders and email service providers, and an updated white paper on email authentication. M3AAWG published the first best practices for mitigating bot infections in residential networks in July 2009, which were incorporated into the IETF's RFC 6561 a few years later. Although M3AAWG does not lobby on government or public policy matters, it does supply factual information to government organizations as they develop relevant policy or legislation,for example on anti-abuse issues with the proposed.

...
Wikipedia