Barry Leiba (born 1957) is a computer scientist and software researcher. He retired from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York in February 2009, and now works for FutureWei Technologies as a Director of Internet Standards. His work has focused for many years on electronic mail and anti-spam technology, on mobile computing and the Internet of things, and on Internet standards.

Work on e-mail and anti-spam technology

Leiba's interest in e-mail began in the early 1980s, with IBM's PROFS system, and with a proprietary e-mail system developed for an IBM customer. In the early 1990s he and his team at IBM Research developed an early implementation of an integrated multimedia e-mail system, called Ultimail, which became part of IBM's TCP/IP product for OS/2. The work on Ultimail led to development of the Internet Messaging Framework, a toolkit for developing Internet-standards-compliant clients and servers. He was part of the team that developed the SpamGuru anti-spam engine at IBM Research. He has published a number of papers at the Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference, and was a program chair for the conference in 2008 and 2010.

Work on Internet standards

Leiba has been involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since the mid-1990s, working on e-mail-related standards, including IMAP, ACAP, updates to SMTP and the Internet message format, lemonade, the Sieve e-mail filtering language, internationalization in general and e-mail address internationalization in particular, and DKIM. He has chaired a number of working groups, including DKIM, OAUTH, CBOR, and DMARC, and served on the Internet Architecture Board from 2007 to 2009. He served on the Internet Engineering Steering Group as Applications Area Director from 2012 to 2016 and as Applications and Real-Time (ART) Area Director from 2019 to 2021, and is the IETF liaison to the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG). He was appointed to the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) in 2018.

Other work

Leiba has also worked on IBM Research projects involving context awareness, mobile and distributed computing, and computer security and access controls. He has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Computer Society's Internet Computing magazine since January 2008, where he is currently serving as Associate Editor in Chief. In June 2022 he was elected to the Internet Society Board of Trustees.

Authored Requests For Comments (RFCs)