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