On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 02:22:07PM +0000, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:
Yahoo and Cisco Monday plan to announce they will submit their e-mail authentication specification, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), to the IETF to be considered as an industry standard.
None of these have the slightest operational value. They are either (a) attempts to exert control over email (for profit, of course) or (b) PR exercises -- for instance, in Yahoo's case, to distract attention from the enormous amount of spam/spam support coming from or facilitated by Yahoo Stores and their freemail operation. See, for instance: Spammers Continue to be the Biggest (By Far) Supporters of Email Authentication http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050711/1945259_F.shtml Oh, not that I expect the backers of these schemes to stop flogging them -- apparently they've managed, mostly by grandisose and bogus claims, to convince at least _some_ gullible people that they have the answer to spam. But they don't -- even if the "perfect" email auth method existed (and of course it doesn't) and was instantaneously and globally deployed tomorrow (ha!), the effect on SMTP spam would be a momentary hiccup, no more, and of course the effect on other forms of spam would be zero. ---Rsk