Yahoo Upgrades Its E-Mail Service
Yahoo's e-mail service will use the company's DomainKeys authentication technology starting Monday, almost a year after Yahoo first unveiled this antispam project.
Source: PC World"This is a really big milestone for us, because with this authentication solution in place, we're increasing protection from ID (identification) theft and phishing," said Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman. DomainKeys attempts to tackle a practice called spoofing, in which a spammer changes an e-mail message's header information to deceive recipients into believing the message was sent by a known and trusted personal acquaintance or legitimate business, such as a bank or credit card company. With spoofing, spammers try to increase the chances that recipients will open and reply to their e-mail messages. Very often, spammers' ultimate goal with spoofing is to trick recipients into revealing confidential information, such as social security numbers, bank account information, and passwords. These scams are often referred to as "phishing." Yahoo's DomainKeys uses cryptography to let receiving e-mail systems validate that an incoming message originated from a user authorized to send e-mail for the domain stated in the header. The receiving e-mail system uses a public key to validate a private-key signature in the incoming message. Other providers of Internet and e-mail services, such as Microsoft and America Online are also involved in individual and collaborative initiatives to combat spam. For example, EarthLink is announcing Monday that it will begin testing DomainKeys.
0