[82319] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Yahoo and Cisco to submit e-mail ID spec to IETF
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Tue Jul 12 12:23:06 2005
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:17:44 -0400
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20050711.072215.27755.37129@webmail23.lax.untd.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 02:22:07PM +0000, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:
> Yahoo and Cisco Monday plan to announce they will submit
> their e-mail authentication specification, DomainKeys
> Identified Mail (DKIM), to the IETF to be considered as
> an industry standard.
None of these have the slightest operational value. They are
either (a) attempts to exert control over email (for profit, of course)
or (b) PR exercises -- for instance, in Yahoo's case, to distract
attention from the enormous amount of spam/spam support coming
from or facilitated by Yahoo Stores and their freemail operation.
See, for instance:
Spammers Continue to be the Biggest (By Far) Supporters of Email Authentication
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050711/1945259_F.shtml
Oh, not that I expect the backers of these schemes to stop flogging them
-- apparently they've managed, mostly by grandisose and bogus claims,
to convince at least _some_ gullible people that they have the answer to
spam. But they don't -- even if the "perfect" email auth method existed
(and of course it doesn't) and was instantaneously and globally deployed
tomorrow (ha!), the effect on SMTP spam would be a momentary hiccup,
no more, and of course the effect on other forms of spam would be zero.
---Rsk
