Yahoo endorses anti-spam "trusted email" technique

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From: "Ray Everett-Church" <ray@eprivacygroup.com>
To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declan@well.com>
Subject: Yahoo discovers TEOS!
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 18:30:52 -0800

                                       |Certified Trusted Sender(tm)|
                                       |     See below to verify    |

Declan:

FYI. This is big news! We congratulate Yahoo on discovering and endorsing
the core elements of our proposal for a Trusted Email Open Standard (see our
TEOS presentation from the May 2003 FTC Spam Forum at
http://www.eprivacygroup.com/teos). An important part of their announcement
is that they've mirrored our long-standing offer to release royalty-free and
open sourced software to speed implementation! This is an important step
towards addressing the fundamental flaws in SMTP that have helped spammers
make such a mess. We call upon the other major ISPs to follow Yahoo's
leadership, and fully embrace a truly open and collaborative effort to save
email.

Regards,
-Ray
--
Ray Everett-Church, Esq.
Chief Privacy Officer - ePrivacyGroup.com
----------------------------------------------------
If a spammer's spam can't leave his server, is he still a spammer?
Come to SpamSquelcher.com and find out!



-----Original Message-----

Yahoo proposes new Internet anti-spam structure
Friday December 5, 5:20 pm ET
By Ben Berkowitz

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/031205/tech_yahoo_1.html

LOS ANGELES, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Internet services company Yahoo Inc.
(NasdaqNM:YHOO - News) on Friday said it is working on technology to combat
e-mail spam by changing the way the Internet works to require authentication
of a message's sender.

Yahoo said its "Domain Keys" software, which it hopes to launch in 2004,
will be made available freely to the developers of the Web's major
open-source e-mail software and systems.

Spam -- unwanted Internet e-mail, direct advertising, body part enlargement,
and other commercial endeavors on the Web -- has quickly become Web surfers'
Public Enemy No. 1 as inboxes around the globe are clogged with hundreds of
such messages daily.

Governments around the world are working on legislation to reduce spam, but
in the interim a number of companies have stepped in with technology
proposals designed to filter and block the electronic detritus.

Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would
embed a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would
check the Internet's Domain Name System for the public key registered to the
sending domain.

If the public key is able to decrypt the private key embedded in the
message, then the e-mail is considered authentic and can be delivered. If
not, then the message is assumed not to be an authentic one from the sender
and is blocked.

[... snipped --DBM ...]

______________________________________________________________________
From: ray@eprivacygroup.com
To:   declan@well.com
Date:  5 Dec 2003

"ePrivacy Group" is an ePrivacy Group Certified Trusted Sender(tm)
Follow Link to Verify at verify.trustedsender.org
<http://verify.trustedsender.org/start_verify.php?AAIxxuWAN17qb-94WWb91MPH15OrQL/omZvREnOGJJAZL2TGwT/iCxPKY3gPmWlPXxoZj52b873v5kR91r5dAqzvVCPa/DyWqx7P9E/VQAAAAAAAAAAAABtKQdeclan@well.com:ray@eprivacygroup.com:WWFob28gZGlzY292ZXJzIFRFT1Mh>
______________________________________________________________________
Posted by Declan McCullagh on Dec 08, 2003