Yahoo announces plan to identify source of spam

YAHOO HAS pre-announced that it intends to do something serious about spam next year, Reuters reports. Its new initiative, named "Domain Keys" will involve automatic cryptographic signatures on mail. The signature will identify which Internet domain the mail is from. This line of attack on spam seems rather more promising than the law-based line, which doesn't seem to be going the right way, even assuming you could identify who the lawbreakers were. And though many of us may feel like kneecapping the spammers, that approach suffers from the same problem, plus the problem of legality.

Though Yahoo is not ready to lay out the details yet, it says it will provide free specifications and code -- always a good way to get your proposal adopted on the Net -- some time next year. In the mean time it is dropping hints. It's the Internet protocol version of vapourware: software announced far in advance of its introduction, with the aim of slowing sales of rival products.

In this case the alternatives being "nipped in the bud" are proposals like SPF, sponsored by Yahoo Mail rivals pobox.com. Other people working on the problem of identifying the source of mail include the IRTF (Internet Research Task Force). Clearly Yahoo doesn't feel these net.bigwigs are getting there fast enough and want to shortcircuit the process by announcing the imminent announcement of its own pet scheme.

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