Feb 24, 2004 : Sendmail to Test Yahoo Email Solution

📅 February 24, 2004 - Email management company Sendmail (sendmail.com) and Yahoo (yahoo.com) said on Tuesday that they would begin testing the DomainKeys cryptographic authentication solution next month. Sendmail will be testing DomainKeys, introduced by Yahoo, across various open standards software. The companies said this will help facilitate rapid adoption of the system across the Internet.

"Cryptographic authentication solutions such as DomainKeys, which was introduced by Yahoo, provide a strong assurance of both the sender's identity and the integrity of email content," says Eric Allman, CTO of Sendmail. "DomainKeys is one of the best cryptographic solutions we have seen because it offers strong authentication and flexibility with low impact to both the email infrastructure and end-users."
DomainKeys is an cryptographic authentication system that verifies the identity of an email sender in order to help filter out spam and viruses. The system uses public/private key cryptography to generate a signature in the header of the email message. The receiving system then verifies the signature with the sender's public key. In the event that the keys do not match, the receiving system's anti-spam policy will activate, removing the offending message.
"By validating identity with DomainKeys, we are knocking down the first and most important domino in the path to solving the spam problem," says Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communication products at Yahoo. "In working with Sendmail, and other industry leaders, we are able to develop a powerful authentication solution to solve the spoofing problem and lay the foundation for future anti-spam advances."