Yahoo and Cisco Partner to Fight Spam with DomainKeys Identified Mail
Cisco Sytems, Inc and Yahoo are combining efforts to cut down on the amount of spam which is being sent and littering inboxes all over the world. The partnership will focus on combining two techniques that rely on cryptography to determine whether the sender of an e-mail message is legitimate. The new technology, DomainKeys Identified Mail, uses elements from Yahoo’s Domainkeys and Cisco’s Internet Identified Mail system.
“This is the first time that we’ve had something fundamental to the mail system that the vendors could get together and agree on,” Sendmail Chief Technology Officer Eric Allman, an e-mail pioneer who helped merge the technologies, told the AP. “That’s an amazing thing right there.”
“We made the decision that, on the surface level, it was going look more like DomainKeys than IIM,” Allman added. “At this point, Yahoo has more of an installed base than Cisco has. We wanted to with the way that would be the easiest upgrade path.”
Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail both have used Domainkeys. Yahoo reports that Yahoo Mail is receiving more than 350 million messages signed by Domainkeys each day – not a bad beginning. If Yahoo, Google, and Cisco can all work together in harmony to fight spam – sobeit! The enemy of my enemy is my comrade, so where is Microsoft in its fight to stop email spam and will Hotmail adopt Domainkeys?
