Yahoo and Cisco Monday plan to announce they will submit
their e-mail authentication specification, DomainKeys
Identified Mail (DKIM), to the IETF to be considered as
an industry standard.
Discussions on DKIM will begin at the IETF meeting in Paris
scheduled to run between July 31 and August 5, Yahoo and
Cisco officials said.
DKIM combines Yahoo's DomainKeys and Cisco's Internet
Identified Mail, two e-mail authentication technologies
developed separately, which the companies announced in
June they would combine with the intention of licensing
the resulting specification royalty-free throughout the
industry.
p.s. Of course, this development comes on the heels of two
other methods for e-mail authentication already published
by the IETF as "experimental" RFC's: "Sender Policy Framework
(SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in E-Mail" and Microsoft's
"Sender ID: Authenticating E-Mail".
DKIM combines Yahoo's DomainKeys and Cisco's Internet
Identified Mail, two e-mail authentication technologies
developed separately, which the companies announced in
June they would combine with the intention of licensing
the resulting specification royalty-free throughout the
industry.
"Roaylty-free" does not mean it can be used by everyone.
Microsoft also promised "royalty-free" use of SID, but it
turned out that did not extend to majority of open source
programs (with rare exception of sendmail).
So don't assume that something like courier-mta or postfix or exim
would necessarily be able to include support for DKIM spec.
p.s. Of course, this development comes on the heels of two
other methods for e-mail authentication already published
by the IETF as "experimental" RFC's: "Sender Policy Framework
(SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in E-Mail" and Microsoft's
"Sender ID: Authenticating E-Mail".
That is false information. They have not been published as "experimental" RFCs, only approved for publication. Publication may come later and yet
may not happen at all.
None of these have the slightest operational value. They are
either (a) attempts to exert control over email (for profit, of course)
or (b) PR exercises -- for instance, in Yahoo's case, to distract
attention from the enormous amount of spam/spam support coming
from or facilitated by Yahoo Stores and their freemail operation.
Oh, not that I expect the backers of these schemes to stop flogging them
-- apparently they've managed, mostly by grandisose and bogus claims,
to convince at least _some_ gullible people that they have the answer to
spam. But they don't -- even if the "perfect" email auth method existed
(and of course it doesn't) and was instantaneously and globally deployed
tomorrow (ha!), the effect on SMTP spam would be a momentary hiccup,
no more, and of course the effect on other forms of spam would be zero.
With regards to Yahoo!, for all intents and purposes it appears to be a modified BSD license with regards to usability. There are some added provisions regarding IP claims against Yahoo! but if that's the only gotcha, I'm more than pleased. It doesn't appear to have any provision which would make it OSL incompatible. Once again, IANAL but I know one on TV.
This is the patent license written for DomainKeys referenced in the DKIM draft, if anyone knows of a more appropriate license to apply, let me know.