Yahoo antispam authentication RFC, GPL, freeware MTA, etc.

[davidh]

# Yahoo!'s DomainKeys Intellectual Property may be licensed under either of the following terms: Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement
# GNU General Public License version 2.0 (and no other version).

In accordance with RFC2026, Yahoo! has also submitted the above license statement to the IETF as an IPR Disclosure. Have license feedback?
Reference Implementation
In addition to the Internet-Draft, Yahoo! has developed a reference implementation for DomainKeys that can be plugged into Message Transfer Agents (MTAs), such as qmail. A version of this software has been released and is available at http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/. Sendmail has developed a DomainKey implementation for their popular MTA (both the commercial and freeware versions). In fact, Sendmail, Inc. has released an open source implementation of the Yahoo! DomainKeys specification for testing on the Internet and is actively seeking participants and feedback for this Pilot Program.

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

[Judy G. Russell]

Did you see that even Microsoft is talking about licensing some source access??? They caved to the Europeans.

[davidh]

Did you see that even Microsoft is talking about licensing some source access??? They caved to the Europeans.

I heard about that.

Regarding the authentication, I did not read the explanation thoroughly.

But I wonder how many, if any, email programs (end-user) will adopt any of this or such protocols themselves, as opposed to server software per se?

For example, several years ago I downloaded a pretty decent freeware SMTP server software to run on a local NT server in the office because the cheap business DSL we had came with very limited SMTP and because we had all our POP3 accounts already hosted on our remote web server account. I suspect that such a solution might not work today because the destination mail servers might be much more fussy about who they accept mail from, because of spam.

The Foxmail 4.x that I'm using now for email apparently has a built in SMTP server one can use to send messages faster, directly to the destination server instead of thru one's normally subscribed ISP SMTP server, but I've never tried it. Could be a useful feature when one is testing things, to speed up turn around times. E.g. sending a message to another account one can access and replying back from there to make a "complete test circuit".

I hope the Microsoft attempt at compliance is a good thing in the long run.

I took a number of genetics courses in college, and expect that evolutionary theory still proposes that much evolution is speeded up because of the fact of genetic isolation by geography. So if mother nature comes up with a good idea, so to speak, it has a chance to develop on its own without being flooded out. And the bad experiments go extinct. Seems like this principle applies to politics too. So to me the idea of one world government does not seem to be the best of all possible worlds. IOW, I don't think EU is totally cool.

OTOH Roman roads, armies, and police made it much easier for Jews and Christians to spread out and infect much of the world. Some viruses might actually be good. (Gam tzu l'tovah [sp?].) For example, eukaryotic organisms [us guys] apparently developed from infection/symbiosis of some prokaryotic organisms by other prokaryotic organisms (e.g. mitchondria look a lot like bacteria). OTOOH, I suppose, according to my perverted imagination, one could consider such an invention by mother nature as an example of rough sex on a microscopic scale. (Gam tzu l'tovah, again?)

D.H.

[Judy G. Russell]

OTOOH, I suppose, according to my perverted imagination, one could consider such an invention by mother nature as an example of rough sex on a microscopic scale. (Gam tzu l'tovah, again?)ROFL!! I think I like the way you think, when I understand it.