Domain Keys for email sender authentication

Posted Jun 22, 2006 14:34 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104)
In reply to: Domain Keys for email sender authentication by job
Parent article: Domain Keys for email sender authentication

PGP signatures certify that the message was signed by a certain person. Domain keys certify that the message was sent from a certain domain. So if you get a DK-authenticated message from foo@yahoo.com, you know that foo is actually a Yahoo user.

DK-authenticated spam can be reported to the domain name owners and (if they seem to be spammers) to their ISPs. Non-authenticated spam is reported to the owners of the IP block where the SMTP server was located. It could be argued that the former is more effective.

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Domain Keys for email sender authentication

Posted Jun 23, 2006 20:08 UTC (Fri) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link] (2 responses)

DK-authenticated spam can be reported to the domain name owners and (if they seem to be spammers) to their ISPs.

This just doesn't mesh with reality. These days, there are two types of spammers. The first are large spamming operations, generally operating from spam-friendly countries. Generally their ISPs don't care (because they're providing net-neutral bandwidth), and the police absolutely don't care. The second kind are virus software. These are starting to become incredibly sophisticated. They know about smarthosts, and they'll know as much about using DKIM to talk to their ISP (and thus send mail the rest of the world will see as legitimate) as MS Outlook does. They may well even use Outlook's libraries to do it.

Calling NetZero and telling them that you got spam from one of their customers is essentially the same as calling them up and telling them their customers are running windows. They may put forth legitimate and concerned effort to stop the spamming, but having it signed isn't going to make it any easier.

Domain Keys for email sender authentication

Posted Jun 24, 2006 2:00 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a 3rd group of spammers: Online retailers. Remember that spam is unsolicited, commercial email. A lot of online retailers seem to believe that if you dare order from them, it is then acceptable for them to send you email advertisements you never requested.

Domain Keys for email sender authentication

Posted Jun 26, 2006 23:46 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

if this was all I had to deal with life would be good and very few people would care about spam.

while this type of mail is mildly annoying it's nowhere near the danger and hassle of the other 90+% of the spam which is from people you have never dealt with before.