The Solution to Spam and Phishing: Domain Names

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/66242.html

Life is truly a series of never ending ironies and paradoxes.  Domain Names, long vilified for their ability to be registered as tools to perpetrate Spam and Phishing may be our salvation from those very scourges.

Domain-keys Identified Mail (DKIM), (originally developed by Yahoo) uses several available methods for battling spam and phishing and creates an innovative method that allows users to separate the useless mails from the useful ones. One departure in the new method is that it does not rely on IP addresses; rather it focuses on the domain names thus adding a digital signature that can be validated by the recipient's system.

Quote: "Domain names are far more stable than IP addresses," said Dave Crocker, who contributed to the DKIM project. "Domain names align with an organization far better than an IP address." He added that the digital signature meant any email could be identified as being sent by a specific someone "rather than as an e-mail coming from an IP address that could be used by multiple people or a spam bot."

As if you needed another reason to love domain names. The foundational elements of the Internet, unfairly maligned as unseemly, domain names may be the path to something beautiful yet ;)

Comments

[Robb]

Don't a lot of spammers use domains in their 'return to' email header that aren't even theirs? I've seen domains I own used by spammers in their emails to me, to make it look like the email is coming from an account on one of my domains. Then you get all these 'message denied' emails back from some of the people it was sent to. Or is there a way to trace their emails back to an original correct domain? What if they are using free email accounts?

On another spam note, I saw a story on ABC Nightline last night about Spam (the meat company) going after SpamArrest (the email spam blocker company) for trademark infringement. The Spam meat people hate their name being used for junk email. I bet a lot of kids growing up now know spam only as junk email, and know nothing about the meat.

***FS*** Good point Rob.. I think DKIM is a two sided handshake that both sender and recipient need to opt into. There are other antispam services that offer similar intermediary filtering services but this domain one was interesting. Re: Hormel's product, I care for that form of spam less than the virtual version.

[AhmedF]

I would say this is over-complication.

The problem is that there is no authentication in SMTP. I can say I am [email protected], and the recipient server believes me.

If it was a two-way send-system instead of just saying 'here' we would eliminate 99.9999% of spam.

[Christopher Ambler]

I need to get a t-shirt that says, "I told you so, years ago."

This is one small part of our original proposal to ICANN for .MAIL in 2003.

We could have been spam-free by now had ICANN approved the proposal.

***FS*** I will buy you that tshirt to wear the day .web goes live sir ... it will get there :)