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

At least it works

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Not going to discuss pros/cons of these systems, but at least the do help. Two days ago I got one of those PayPal phishing emails in my hotmail account and hotmail had a big banner on top saying the sender's ID couldn't be verified. This could be a great help to users silly enough to fall for these attacks (assuming they actually pay attention to the warnings).