Yahoo and Cisco are developing a new solution to fight email spam.
The partners have pledged to develop a specification combining their respective cryptographic-based security offerings: Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Internet Identified Mail from Cisco.
The new product will be called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and will be offered royalty-free to the industry.
The goal behind this technology is to be able to trace spam emails back to their origin so they can be shut down.
“The spam problems is so large that no one company can solve it, so it’s good to see major companies like Yahoo and Cisco combine their strengths and make the technology widely available,” said Yankee Group senior analyst Andrew Jaquith.
He pointed out that among businesses, spam comprises anywhere from 30 percent to 90 percent of e-mail.
The new technology will be open and royalty free in the hopes that the new system will be used widely enough to effectively shut down email spammers completely.