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The “Big Six ISPs” anti-spam alliance

There have been rumors for a few months about the secretive Microsoft / AOL alliance against spam. A recent story revealed some of those plans:

“One organization working on sender-authentication mechanism is a commercial alliance comprising the biggest consumer e-mail providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, America Online and Earthlink.”"Under the proposal, ISPs and any other organization with their own domain name system (DNS) would use a private key in their mail servers to place an encrypted code in the header of each piece of outgoing mail. When the mail arrived at its destination, the receiving mail server would get the sender’s public key from its DNS server to decrypt the header, thus verifying the message’s origin.

If the message is spam, or even a legitimate marketing message the receiver doesn’t want, then email from that DNS can be blacklisted, or automatically blocked. “Once you have identity, then you can establish reputation and trust,” Libbey said. “Those are really important concepts in e-mail.”

Yahoo has done some proof-of-concept testing of the idea internally, but the technology is still at the early stages of development and no timetable for general release has been set.”

Tags: aol, asrg, microsoft, spam, yahoo

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