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PayPal Asks E-mail Services to Block Messages
roscoetoon writes ""PayPal, the Internet-based money transfer system owned by eBay, is trying to persuade e-mail providers to block messages that lack digital signatures, which are aimed at cutting down on phishing scams, a company attorney said Tuesday.So far, no agreements have been reached,..." "...PayPal is using several technologies to digitally sign its e-mails now, including DomainKeys, Sullivan said. DomainKeys, a technology developed by Yahoo Inc., enables verification of the sender and integrity of the message that's sent." "...An agreement with, for example, Google for its Gmail service could potentially stop spam messages that look legitimate and bypass spam filters.""
There are *not* trivial measures. You cannot mandate that every email reader/client in the world implemented any particular verification scheme. If its so trivial *you* do it. Heck, feel free to begin how to detect if a message 'looks' like a paypal message (but isnt really).
Its not that it would be so difficult to verify that a particular message really is from paypal. However, thats solving the wrong problem. You have to be able to detect the ones that 'Joe Sixpack' is going to *think* are from Paypal but are not. The other option is for Joe Sixpack to learn to actually verify each message that he thinks are from paypal, really are.