The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has unveiled a new tool that can battle against phishing and spam and authenticate email as well. The tool called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) system is a new way to validate the real identity of the person sending an email.
The DKIM 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.
"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 used by multiple people or a spam bot."
However if the technology should work, both sender and recipient must be signed up in the DKIM project. DomainKeys project was first begun by Yahoo Inc and was also embraced by Cisco Systems. The project seeks to reduce the amount of spam that filters into inboxes.
Mark Delany, the leading light behind DomainKeys said the main aim was to protect users from receiving spam, "DomainKeys Identified Mail is positioned to become the pre-eminent standard for e-mail authentication," he said.
