Yahoo and Cisco to submit e-mail ID spec to IETF

Tue Jul 12 16:17:44 UTC 2005

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