Yahoo has announced some very interesting plans to take the anti-spam fight to a much deeper level of the internet.
The company is, in essence, proposing to change the way the internet works, by requiring emails to prove they've come from a real email address before they are sent on their way across the net. It is planning to launch the technology, called "domain keys", next year, and will make it available for free to "developers of the web's major open-source email software and systems". That's according to Reuters, who probably don't mean quite what they say but, hey, we'll let 'em off for now.
"One of the core problems with spam is we don't know, Yahoo doesn't know, the user doesn't know... if [an email] really came from the party who says it came from," Brad Garlinghouse, vice president for communication products at Yahoo, told Reuters. "If we can get only a small percentage of the industry to buy in, we think it can have a dent," he said.
Indeed. Could this be the start of the real cure for spam (as opposed to well-meaning, but ultimately doomed, attempts to legislate junk email away)? I think it looks like it: making the sending of anonymous email, or email with a faked "from" address, will make life much more difficult for spammers. So, voila: an early contender for tech story of 2004, right here.
