Microsoft and Yahoo! Fight Spam - Sort Of

kyndig writes "In a Forbes article, Microsoft claims that 90% of email on the internet is spam. To fight this, Yahoo! has teamed with Cisco in developing DKIM, a signature based email authentication. Not to be outdone, Microsoft is proposing SenderID, which examines an email to see if it is coming from an authorized server. Earthlink's chief technology officer, Tripp Cox, goes on to examine the pro's and con's of each specification and provides practical application results." From the article: "Critics have accused Microsoft forcing SenderID on the industry without addressing questions about perceived shortcomings. The company drew fresh criticism recently when reports claimed that its Hotmail service would delete all messages without a valid SenderID record beginning in November. While AOL uses SPF, many e-mail systems do not. If Microsoft went through with this, for example, a significant portion of valid e-mails would never reach intended Hotmail recipients."

Comments

Re:At least it works

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Not sure about that. The system is obviously running now since I got that message for the phishing email, but that is the first one of those warning I've noticed.

So thus far I've gotten one phishing email and it was properly flagged. Nothing else I've recieved thus far has been recieved. So at least thus far for me I've had 0% of false positives and 0% false negitives. Will it always work this well? I don't know. Are others having more false positives/negitives? I don't know. But at least from what I've seen thus far its working just as it should.

Now I'm not saying the problem is solved and we can relax now, but this at least seems to be a good first step which is at least helping today. We could wait 2-3-5... years till everyone can agree on a standard, but if there is a system that will at least help today should they not use it just because everyone doesn't agree on it?

Re:what should be done

[snorklewacker]

I think we are at the point bandwidth wise where we can flip email upside down and let the senders server hold the email, and simply notify the recipients server that there is an email waiting for it.

Golly, no one's ever suggested that before, what a great idea. I really look forward to getting 404 errors with individual mail messages, and depending on 58,7124 different mail servers to get each message through to me as I click on it instead of just one that can be failed over if it falls over.

And all we have to do is completely redesign the entire e-mail system to do it. I bet you'll have no problem convincing everyone to jump on board.