Bye Bye Spam and Phishing with DKIM?

ppadala writes "While research from PEW Internet (PDF) shows that few users really are bothered by spam, IETF is supporting a public key cryptographic based e-mail authentication mechanism called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures . The new spec is supposed to help in fighting both spam and fraud. From Ars Technica: 'DKIM's precursor, DomainKeys, was originally developed by Yahoo. The specifications for DKIM were then extended by an informal group of IT organizations that included companies like Yahoo, Cisco, EarthLink, Microsoft, and VeriSign, among others. It was first submitted by the group to the IETF in mid-2005, but only recently published by the IETF. The spec is still to be incorporated into a more formal draft and submitted for approval, however.'"

Comments

Users are not bothered by spam?

[Gary W. Longsine]

I find it difficult to believe that most users are not bothered by spam. As far as I can tell, legitimate email use has been falling dramatically for the past couple years, as people flee the effects of spam, switching to SMS and IM (Jabber, AIM, etc.) Email use within a single corporation remains popular, but home users seem to be abandoning email outright. Some people have given up ordinary email and only use locked-down email inside of social network sites. Spam seems to be killing email. If that doesn't bother people, it's only because they fled email for IM, SMS, and Myspace. If spam follows them, and they have nowhere else to run, they're going to become pretty irate.