Yahoo! Mail Now Using Domain Keys To Fight Spam 222
scubacuda points out this CNET story, writing "In addition to beefing up its storage (100MB -> 250MB), Yahoo! Mail has implemented Domain Keys to find spam. The idea is simple: give email providers a way to verify the domain and integrity of the messages sent. Sendmail, Inc. has released an open source implementation of the Yahoo! DomainKeys specification for testing on the Internet and is actively seeking participants and feedback for its Pilot Program. Yahoo! has submitted the DomainKeys framework as an Internet Draft, titled 'draft-delany-domainkeys-base-01.txt,' for publication with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). The patent license agreement can be found here."
Is this going to help? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, and if they do illegal things with their verified domains, those domains can be suspended and their purchase tracked. If they do legal but distasteful things with their verified domains, we can block the domain.
SPF, Sender/Caller ID, and Domain Keys are all basically identity verification services. They allow responses to emails that assume that the sender information is correct.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:5, Informative)
Today I can easily send mail seemingly coming from any domain. The idea with this is that the sender can be verified to come from the named domain. Ie. To stop domain spoofing.
Ofcuourse spamers can set up domains for the purpose of sending Spam, but they will be easier to track, as you can be sure the sender is actually connected to that domain.
Further many of todays Scam pretend to come from your bank, sent with authentic Email address. With this, if you get email from the bank, you can be sure atleast that the email came from the email server of that bank (though as usualy you should be careful)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:3, Insightful)
So now people will get the impression that you can now reject from addresses with domains that don't match the servers they were sent through.
But have you checked headers? Only time from addresses match the server address is with webmail or other in-domain type of sending mechanisims.
For instance, my domain is hosted on a remote server as a home user without mounds of $$$. But my smtp is comcast because that is my ISP. So the f
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is why also authenticated and secured SMTP is being promoted. You will need to use your own SMTP, and if it is not in your own network, you will need to authenticate yourself (obviously, leaving the server as an open relay is no alternative), and probably using a secure connection to avoid password sniffings,
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:5, Informative)
But my smtp is comcast because that is my ISP. So the from will be my domain but the server will be comcast. So are we going to reject everyone else who refuses to use their ISPs email service but is forced to use their SMTP?
You're totally missunderstanding what domainkeys does. Very simply, your domain publishes a public key that anyone can use to verify that you (and only you) signed a message via the private key. The public key gets published via a DNS record. When you send an outgoing message the sender signs each message with his/her private key. The private key is kept as a secret to only authorized signers. The signing can happen in the email client, or via the SMTP server. In your case this would very likely be done by the mail client.
All that's required to use domainkeys for the sender is the ability to add a TXT record to a domains DNS record, and a mail client (or possibly server) that supports signing mail.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
If the next Outlook Express included PGP/GPG signature checking, I think we'd be in much better shape. Unfortunately, it is basically all in Microsoft's control where we go from here.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Really, I must've read a hundred of these things and my first thought is always, "*this* mess is from an internationally respected business? did someone spike the water cooler?"
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:5, Interesting)
Certanly.. Sending mail from your owned machine is a good start. Your machine, your MTA, your key, but not your message...
Expect more agressive attempts to find unpatched machines to become mail bots on the net.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:5, Informative)
In contrast, DomainKeys is a signature based or crypto solution that uses a public private key set to enable a receiving mail provider to know definitively if the mail came from the domain it says it came from - regardless of the most recent (forwarding system) IP address.
Does this help? unquestionably. With a robust authentication system in place (DomainKeys) - Y! Mail can apply with more confidence the reputation engine - at Y! this is called SpamGuard and benefits immensely from user reports saying "spam" and "not spam". As other's have wondered in this thread, even if it's a new domain, with no reputation - this in and of itself is helpful and by definition more suspicious. If its not a new domain and spammers are just using domainkeys - the reputation can be enforced reliably.
DomainKeys provides definitive authentication of the sending Domain. I think of this as the first domino in a long line of Dominoes that needs to be knocked over to truly root out spam. The good news is that DomainKeys knocks this first one over in reliably providing identity of the sending domain - now it's up to the industry to keep knocking over additional Dominoes.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Considering that the draft will be enhanced with things like per-hop signing, trust schemes, etc I find this bit slightly worrying.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
SPF doesn't require a change to the mail message, only an added TXT record in DNS. If the TXT record is present, I make the check at the receiver. If it isn't, I don't. I added a TXT record to protect my domain from being spoofed, and I don't care whether you add one or not.
Re:Is this going to help? (Score:2)
Expect this system to seriously bog down typical mail servers which already run at 20% or better of their available CPU capacity, especially if it gains any prevalence or is used for m
Big boys (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Big boys (Score:5, Insightful)
Any solution needs to be EXTREMELY widely adopted and easy to implement. In order to achieve this it has to be simple to understand, definately of friendly license and easy (and free) to implement on *ANY* MTA. Finally it must hold the promise to the small guy that it will reduce spam.
I would ask how many of you (or someone you know) has wound up on one of the RBL lists? Was it through a simple configuration error, from simply not understanding the implications of all of the configuration options or from just trying to solve a problem (such as the boss not being able to send mail)? At the same time, how many actually just check the RBL's on incoming mail? It's the simplest, cheapest way to reduce spam, yet....?
If most don't implement what we have already, we should anyone expect widespread implementation (key to success) of a new system?
Re:Big boys (Score:2)
The problem is that quite a few people have a very strong dislike of RBLs, and will not use them as a matter of principe. Others feel less strongly, but believe that the drawback of the RBL solution is bigger then what it gets us. (you can argue a lot about this, but there are people who feel that way, accept it as a fact for the sake of the discussion about domainkeys)
So,
Re:Big boys (Score:2)
Quite a few. None of them were running an open relay; it was just RBL software/maintainers deciding to arbitarily block a nice big chunk of address space, probably because of a single host a few thousand IP's away.
Yet they block tonnes of legitimate mail if you use them as blackhole lists, instead of just factoring them into your content-scanning filters.
Re:Big boys (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:3, Insightful)
So even if they change it, you don't have to change along.
But then, *every* description they give can be interpreted as a submarine patent, which is
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:5, Informative)
The license states that it is "sub-licensable":
1.1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract. So, even though there is nothing preventing Yahoo! from charging for the license in the future, the licensors that would have already executed the license agreement would be under no obligation to do so. Those licensors would be able to sub-license the patents to new licensees under the original terms. So, there's no real problem there.
This, of course, is in sharp contrast to Microsoft's SenderID patent licensing scheme when the license granted by MS was "personal" and not sub-licensable. So, in effect, Microsoft would maintain control over any new licensee agreement. The Yahoo! agreement doesn't seem to suffer from the same impediment.
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:4, Insightful)
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract.
Probably. But lawyers have the term "irrevocable" to make that clear. If that term isn't being used, it's either an oversight that should get fixed, or it's a potential problem.
Also, a page of text posted on a web page isn't a legal agreement, so these terms only apply to people who do something more than just look at a web page.
Really the safest thing to do would be for Yahoo! to officially dedicate the patent to the public domain through the USPTO. I trust Yahoo! current management, but their management can change.
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
I'm not sure about this but if Y! licensed a sub-licensable patent to party A, and A licensed it to B - how can Y! revoke B's license? There have been no contracts between Y! and B. So, even if we assume that the license is revokable, Y! can only revoke A's license; and only A can revoke B's license. If Y! does revoke A's license, A can re-license it from any of the other B parties that previously had sub-licensed from anyone other than Y
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
In any case, I don't know what happens in that case, you don't know what happens in that case, so it is therefore something that the contract should clarify.
Dedicating the patents would be ideal from an outsider's point of view; but who knows what's going on with executives and lawyers? Fiduciary responsibility, investor laws
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:5, Insightful)
This very much like the clause in a well-known free software license, the GPL. ("you can redistribute [...] under the terms of the GNU GPL [...]; either version 2 [...], or (at your option) any later version.")
In theory, if Yahoo changes the license, new developers wouldn't be able to use the older license, so they could wait until the patent becomes popular and then demand payment from new licensees.
But there's hardly any danger of that becoming a problem, since: "3.4 You may choose to distribute [...] a sublicense agreement, provided that: [...] such agreement complies with the terms and conditions of this Agreement"
So as long as there is anyone who accepted the old license (I just did) who is willing to sublicense to a new developer (I will, free of any charge) under the old license, the new developer doesn't need Yahoo.
- Erwin
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2, Insightful)
This very much like the clause in a well-known free software license, the GPL. ("you can redistribute [...] under the terms of the GNU GPL [...]; either version 2 [...], or (at your option) any later version.")
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
As someone else said in the same thread, the keyword missing in their agreement is "irrevocable". If is is not, it may be revoked at any time.
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
The patent license clearly describes under which circumstances it is automatically (intrinsically) revoked, such as when you sue Yahoo for patent infringment relating to the implementation of the DomainKeys specification, or upon notice in other clearly described cases. See section 3.7. Apart from that, once you accept the offer of the patent license in a legally binding way,
Where are the patent claims? (Score:2)
3.1. You agree not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other DomainKeys Developer, a patent infringement claim against any Implementation ("Implementation IP Claim").
They proceed to give identification numbers for patent applications, not granted patents. I was not able to locate these applications at the USPTO [uspto.gov], so perhaps they are unpublished?
For all we know
Re:I just RTFA... submarine patent potential (Score:2)
This, if correct, would make this a non-GPL compatible Open Source license.
OTOH, it seems to me that this is offered without a termination clause, so it seems that Yahoo would not be able to change the terms for those agreeing to the original terms. And those terms allow the agreement to be sublicensed. So I don't THINK that there's sub-marine patent potential (unless there's some oth
Strangely enough... (Score:5, Informative)
http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/10/18/0236201.shtm
Licence (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Licence (Score:5, Interesting)
(Although only in source & object code so not on boxes or ads and stuff, but even object code is already a problem)
It seems reasonable at first (Just one line saying 'thank you Yahoo') but it has the same problem as the BSD license had: You end up with an ever growing amount of lines of all kind of people wanting the world to know you used a pieco of their 'IP'.
Imagine a helloworld program like this:
~$hello
Hello world
This program was compiled using the GNU C compiler
This program uses header files written by Linus Torvalds.
This program was linked against the GNU C library
This program was written in the C language which contains IP from K&R.
This program uses SCO owned IP.
Would it be a great world if all software was like this?
Jeroen
Re:Licence (Score:2, Informative)
Advertising clauses typically only require acknowledgement wherever you already put your own copyright notices. So, using your example, the output of "hello -V" and the second page of your manual, if you had one, might have to contain the additional text. Mixing copyright notices into the expected regular output of your program would be silly.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents and Standards .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or even better a patent grant for code under "OSI approved" licenses
Seems to be a very nice Public key based system using standard RSA algorithm too . But I still want my ogg streams over DNS
Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with spam is slowing it down, whats really needed is a CPU intensive solution like the hashcash suggestion (like which has been suggested before), that way mass spammers can be differentiated from different users. While mailing lists may suffer due to it, with the addition of a standard mailing list protocol where you email a certain message to your mailing server, they send a message to the mailing list to subscribe on behalf of you, and for your account prevent the need to use hashcash.
The only way this could help spam is if Microsoft started charging for emails (which they have wanted to do for a while now).
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:5, Informative)
Bob Beck from the OpenBSD team says it better than me [onlamp.com]. (Read the whole interview btw, it's very very interesting).
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:4, Informative)
Now, while that line is correct, it also shows quite clearly what is behind Bob's statement (see below)
> 1. Encourages spammers to publish SPF records (and they have).
> If I were a spammer, I would publish SPF records for my throwaway domains to allow the places I'm spamming from. There's a nice site about SPF that tells me how to do it
Yes, they can do that for sure.
> 2. Encourages spammers not to spam from SPF-publishing addresses.
> (And don't forget, this is what AOL and MSN *really* care abo
ANd it also happens to be what I as a small business and private user care about.
WHen I get an email from a site that publishes SPF records, I can have a reasonable level of confidence int hat it really comes from that site (ie, my bank, ebay etc etc).
It will also help reducing the flood of failure messages that result from anti virus software and mail viruses.
It will also help create an environment where we can held peopel responsible for what they send out since we have a reasonable assurance they indeed did send it.
Together this makes for an environment that also discourages spam, but that is not the primary goal of it, and it wont stop spam by itself.
It seems from reading the interview that Bob has a bit of an issue with SPF and similar for emotional rather then technical reasons. The way he says things (is this the interview?) is suggesting he believes SPF makes the situation worse. It appears to me however that 1. that is not the case, and 2. that opinion is mostly motivated by his support for the RBLs and not wantign alternative solutions.
RBLs are a bad solution because they create a bigger problem then the one they try to solve.
- It creates small groups of people with an insane amount of influence on email delivery, thereby putting power in the hands of people who can not be held accountable for their actions, but can disrupt things quite seriously.
- In order to be usable, an RBL has to be both very fast and very accurate. Those two are managable as long as there are few incidents only.
We do not need dictatorships or burocraciies to manage the flow of email, and they are more serious issues then spam in the end.
People unclear on the concept... (Score:3, Informative)
Suppose I want to be sure to get purchase orders from joe@example.com. I add his domain to my whitelist so it doesn't go through my bayesian filter (in my real life experience, POs tend to look like spam to filters). Unfortunately, I now get 6 spams claiming to be from joe@example.com for every real message from joe@example.com.
So I ask Joe which IP addresses he normally sends mail from, and whitelist his domain only when it comes from those IP addresses. This is reall
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I doubt this will hold true for long if enough mail providers start supporting it, companies starts registering them, and black lists with "bad domain keys" are created. Yes, it might take a while for all this to happen, but so would it do for many people to accept your suggestion.
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:4, Insightful)
Recent research pointed out that the majority of domainkey users so far have been spammers, because it makes it more likely they pass the spam filters. Its really no better then the techniques used now, especially because a large amount of spam isn't using spoofed addresses, but completely valid ones.
It's a common misconception that things like SPF and domain keys are tools for stopping spam. They're not. They're infrastructure to be used for building anti-spam tools.
The real advantage to domain keys is that there's an immediate advantage for using them. Senders benefit because it gives their messages more credibility (making it practical for people to, for example, whitelist mail from yahoo.com,) and receivers benefit because they can identify some spoofed messages with absolute certainty, saving some bandwidth and thwarting some phishers. The more implementers there are, the more valuable the system becomes and the more implementers there will be.
And once anti-spoofing is in place, then we can leverage those into anti-spam techniques to root out throwaway domains. (E.g. seriously throttle the incoming connection from any domain that is blacklisted, doesn't implement authentication and that has not sent out at least one message a month for the last six months.)
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2)
fix isn't to slow it down, the fix is for Microsoft to fix their borked OSes and make it impossible for them to be zombified... then spammers will have to go to using more awkward methods. In the meantime, ISPs should be more proactive and toss zombied boxes off the network. Users will
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2)
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2)
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2)
I'm advocating the ISP version of OS best practices: Defaults are sensible and safe, unneeded and potentially harmful services and networking are turned off until the user decides otherwise. If someone isn't smart enough to flip a switch to the direct connection position, they aren't smart enough to handle
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2)
Whatdya mean that's no better? That's a *huge* step forward. Suddenly, you can implement simple domain-based whitelists and blacklists. And you've got a lead for tracking down con artists and other illegal schemers.
Something that *is* helpful in stopping spam... (Score:2)
Which kills legitimate mailing lists.
There's one way to prevent spam and that's to make it a lot more expensive in human time to send unsolicited bulk email. There's no way to do this, though, without making it a little more expensive in human time to send single messages, or to sign up to a mailing list.
I've been using it for my family's mail for the past few years and so far as I know a total of one Nigerian has decided it's w
Re:Not that helpful in stopping spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Got a link for that? It's news to me, and I'm one of the SpamAssassin development team. I think you're confusing DK with SPF.
Either way, it's an irrelevant point. Sure, spammers can tie themselves down to one IP by using SPF, or tie themselves to a domain by using DK -- and we then have removed a layer of their anonymity and given ourselves a new tool in our armoury against them. *THAT* is the point.
It's not to fight spam, it's to prevent forgery (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, when a spammer tries to send a dk-enabled recipient, faking a dk-enabled domain, the recipients MTA rejects immediately, rather than bouncing, which would go to the wrong place.
Domainkeys don't mean "not spam". They mean "this MTA is authorized to send on our behalf". That MTA may well be a spam-friendly MTA.
Except this will break my Email (Score:3, Insightful)
The only problem with this solution is that it's going to make sending email virtually unusable for people like me. I work for myself, and have my domain and email inbox provided by a hosting company. When working from my home office I connect to the net using a local broadband ISP and I have to use their SMTP server for sending mail. I can't use my hosting company's server cos I'm outside their network. Similarly, when I'm away from my office, I connect to the net using GPRS and use my mobile provider'
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty much every mainstream email client now supports it, and a any decent hosting company selling you service should support it too.
Ewan
No, it won't. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No, it won't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to do with the Envelope, all to do the with the RFC822 message
http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys
"When each email is sent by an authorized end-user within the domain, the DomainKey-enabled email system automatically uses the stored private key to generate a digital signature of the message. This signature is then pre-pended as a header to the email."
"The DomainKeys-enabled receiving email system extracts the signature and claimed From: domain from the email headers and fetches the public key f
Re:No, it won't. (Score:2)
As I read the DomainKeys(tm)(pat. pending) spec, he can't. The signature includes all the headers, and if some get added or changed (as they will when passing it through the MTA) the signature's invalid. See the DK FAQ discussion on mailing lists.
Now, let's say I send mail From: my domain "example.com" through MTAs at tmail.com and hosting.com in addition to example.com. Can I publish the public keys for those do
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:2)
Secondly, there's lots of ways that your hosting company could fix their setup to allow you to safely and reliably relay. Things like pop-before-smtp, or authenticated SMTP (either by normal SMTP port 25 or by the s
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:2)
Thanks for your thoughts. Hopefully then, if whichever outbound SMTP server I'm using signs the mail with a private key, but my hosting company doesn't publish a public key in DNS for my domain, then the default behavior will be to allow email through and not drop it in the bit bucket. I wonder if this behavior will be written into an RFC or left to be implementation specific.
I've tried pinging my hosting company before now about setting up an authenticated SMTP server when I first learned about the poss
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:2)
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:3, Informative)
The reality of spam and network abuse means that we are going to have to move to something more locked down. SPF and YDK give us this without ditching SMTP. It does mess some people up, but there are existing soultions for all those problems. The submission port is one of those. There are also SMTP-Auth and POP-before-SMTP. I also have a webmail service running for my home email. Th
Re:Except this will break my Email (Score:2)
Re:It's not to fight spam, it's to prevent forgery (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, fixing forgery will go a long ways toward fixing spam. Spammers can not only be anonymous, but they can even spoof legitimate addresses. Remove that anonymity by tying them to a domain, which is registered, and we can hunt them down and have our way with them.
Think about your inbox. Immediately remove the scam mails spoofing banks, etc. Now, bring the ones from known good domains to the front and push known bad domains to the back. Finally, mark the spam and your MUA automatically notifies the d
Should work for virus mail too then (Score:2)
Of course, I suspect this won't happen because even today, when all virus mail uses forged sender addresses, too many virus scanners insist on sending "your email has a virus, here it is attached" responses, despite the fact the up-to-date virus scanner could trivially have a flag to say "spoofed, delete it" next to the fancy virus signature stuff you have to pay $$ for.
the tollgate for the next "eyeballs" of the net... (Score:3, Insightful)
How? you ask (or not)
1. Company BigBox declares "All mail destined for our free mail accts must use Yahoo! Domain Keys (TM, R, SM, Patent #suckitlosers)"
2. Their mail servers count the number of emails signed by company X. (incrementing a long int counter associated with cert X in postgresql or yoursql is much less expensive than the YDK verification process)
3. They send a bill for USD 0.01 per email to the (email) address associated with the signing cert for company X during a given month.
4a. Company X says fuck off and doesn't pay the bill, BigBox tags Company X's cert record in their db and which blocks all incoming emails signed by that cert at the mail server untill the bill is paid.
4b. Company X tries to say "we didn't send that many emails to your captive eyeballboxes, it was Bad People (TM) who did it with our cert" BigBox says "Then you should have revoked your keys, beeeyyyyoutch!"
Don't say I didn't warn you - I even tried to make a long bet [longbets.org] about it because at the time we didn't know how long it would take before the major players would implement YDK - and I wanted Yahoo! to bet against me, so that they couldn't disingenuously act as if they had never heard/thought of that use for Yahoo! Demon Keys.
Patent it (Score:2)
PGP Signing? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's too bad webmail and other MUAs don't include PGP as a more standard option.
opening myself up to ridicule (Score:2)
and yes, this is an honest question
DomainKeys breaks RFC 2821 and 2822 (Score:5, Informative)
agreed, is broken - DomainKeys should be chainable (Score:2)
Spam and patents (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope in Europe we will get safe from software patents [nosoftpatents.com]. It is worth to fight for that.
I don't believe that conceptual protection of software was bad but patents ARE the wrong instruments. Players such as FFII's Hartmut Pilch propose Industrial Copyright to fill the gap. It there is a gap.
For the EU Patent directive European market players [protectinnovation.org] need certain amendments [ffii.org] into the directive.
Yahoo could save wasted money.
To find out more about patents I recommend a short introduction text of FFII [ffii.org].
Re:OFF Topic! (Score:2)
Call me a cynic but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Call me a cynic but... (Score:2)
I have a premium yahoo account. I was pleased yesterday to find it had jumped to 2GB of storage and the attachment size had jumped from 5MB to 25MB.
The other thing I noticed though is that you can only send to 10 recipients at a time and it won't send ANY email if one of those addresses is an invalid email account or is even port blocked.
I tested this out several times yesterday.
I do believe you are correct that
Re:Call me a cynic but... (Score:2)
Why would Yahoo! do anything that would cause them to be blacklisted?
(Before you say nobody would blacklist Yahoo check history; national mail providers have been blacklisted in the past -- when they decided to do nothing about spam and pissed off enough people.)
I use it, it sucks (Score:2)
It seems to work in almost arbitrary fashion. It never "learns" like it is supposed to. No matter how many times I indicate that certain senders are not spam, or that certain senders are spam, yahoo files emails from certain senders in "bulk mail" other in my standard inbox.
Since I have to check both my "bulk mail" and inbox anyway; there is little benefit to yahoo's spam checking. I appreciate the effort, But, it doesn't work well enough t
Re:I use it, it sucks (Score:2)
It has nothing to do with incoming mail unless the sender domain of a given peice of mail uses it, then if you get a mail claiming to be from that domain, you could check it. So before it will have much of an impact, *lots* of domains will have to implement it. But since (at one point at least) the big freemail providers domains were popular for for
Heres why it stops spam (Score:2, Interesting)
DomainKeys makes it harder to send general spam as well. It allows spammers to be tracked. It also allows easy blacklisting of known spam servers. ISP's will be more strict about letting spammers use their SMTP servers out of fear of being blacklisted.
Finally,
here's why it doesn't. (Score:2)
You're mixing up phishing and similar identity theft scams and spamming. This is like arguing that laws against online porn will stop spam: you're targeting particular uses of spam... and this has never worked except partially and temporarily.
DomainKeys [...] also allows easy blacklisting of known spam servers.
We already know from the contents of the message, from the source address, the envelope, and th
Re:here's why it doesn't. (Score:2)
Only if DomainKeys are universally supported for all such cases. And ISPs are willing to let their own customers register when it's appropriate.
I mean, we can already block dynamic addresses through an RBL pretty reliably, and since you're assuming enough ISPs go along to make it worthwhile you might as well assume they would self-RBL their own dynamic space and make it absolutely accurate.
And they haven't, in general.
This ma
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
Yes, and no. The domain name of an SMTP remote end is often reverse-resolved to verify that the message is comming from the machine that named in the "hello" message in the SMTP exchange.
My reverse resolution doesn't match my forward claim.
This is (currently) ok [I think] for some agents, but not for others. As soon as the triangle is closed (all three must match) the damage will be intense.
Remember that a lot of black/white li
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't make any sense. If you have your own domain then you will just put the DK public key in the record for that domain. It doesn't matter what your sending IP address reverse-resolves to, because that isn't how Domain Keys works. You can even relay the signed mails through your ISP because, once signed, their authenticity can be verified regardless of the MTA that is passing them on.
- Brian.
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
And kind of wrong too...
See, as soon as spammers begin dilluting their namespaces by registering foo.com and then running their onw name-server so that they can create X.Y.Z.foo.com they will be able to flood the keyspace. The providers will not be able to just fliter on two-names automatically (e.g. foo.com) because real organizations that use the DNS correctly (like mit.edu etc) don't flatten tehir domain space.
Alternately, the infinite number of zombie
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
This doesnt validate the PTR record for your IP - the sending MTA signs the message, with the key for domain in the 'From' header. If you have a domain, and you want to use domainkeys, you make a domainkeys public key, put it in your domains DNS, and then setup your MTA to add the sigs. It doesnt matter what your IP is, or if you relay thru another MTA.
Re:Idea simple... too simple (Score:2)
[step zero, I get to convince register.com to add key record support at no extra charge or start my own full-time DNS server. but I digress.]
So spammer bob comes along and registers foo.com and points it at his own DNS server.
Then he fabricates X.Y.Z.foo.com (where X Y and Z are variables) and generates accompanying keys. [Or he slips $1000USD to some lacky at yahoo.com and makes off with their secret key.]
He then sends his email through open relays and zombie machines.
The mail
Re:How is this so much better and easier than SPF? (Score:3, Informative)
In cont
Yes, but this isn't what is important (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not a different approach (Score:2)
How much profit do credit card companies make from spam?
Maybe that explains why there is so much spam!
Re:Hosting multiple domains (Score:2)
-russ
Re:How to break DomainKeys (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Yahoo Mail looks horrible in Firefox (Score:2)