• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 12, 2005

Yahoo! and Cisco Systems have proposed as an industry standard the anti-spam technology the two launched in early June. Dubbed DomainKeys Identified Mail, the tool which verifies the origins of e-mail messages, was the combination two related and rival tools: Yahoo!'s Domain Keys and Cisco's Identified Internet Mail. Working with software markers Sendmail and PGP, the two companies submitted their joint technology to the Internet Engineering Task Force over the weekend.

Known as DKIM, the e-mail authentication technology uses key cryptography that allows users to verify and maintain message integrity, and identifies legitimate messages. It's useful for companies that send transactional e-mail to consumers, including banks, telecoms, and online merchants.

Being offered to the industry royalty-free, DKIM borrows elements from Yahoo!'s DomainKeys and the network equipment maker's Internet Identified Mail system. And while technical differences exist, each attaches a scrambled digital signature to a user's mail, which can then be vetted to make sure that it's actually being sent from the domain in the sender's address.

Both Yahoo!'s e-mail service and Google's Gmail e-mail have initiated DomainKeys, and a huge demand for just such a collaboration existed, according to Miles Libbey, anti-spam product manager for Yahoo! Mail.