By David Meyer, 7 June 2007 16:56
NEWS
Five of the largest ISPs in the US are to start charging businesses for guaranteed delivery of their emails, in a bid to combat spam.
Goodmail Systems, which provides a service called CertifiedEmail, has signed up Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable's Road Runner and Verizon as customers. Emails certified using the system are marked with a blue ribbon to show they come from a trusted source, thus bypassing spam filters - a privilege that will cost the sender a quarter of a US cent per email.
The voluntary scheme is aimed at large corporations and financial institutions whose mass mailings are most likely to be spoofed and caught in spam filters. Not-for-profit groups will be able to use the service for roughly a tenth of the commercial rate.
Goodmail's chief executive, Richard Gingras, said: "With spam and phishing hitting historic highs even in the last six months, we have seen the limits of technologies which attempt to filter out the bad email. Consumers want their email system to let them know which email is real and safe to open and act on."
Peter Castleton, director of Verizon's consumer broadband services, said phishing and fraud are eroding trust in email as a medium. "A certification service, such as CertifiedEmail, enables us to help restore that trust and makes it easier for consumers to identify legitimate email messages," he said.
According to Goodmail, seven US ISPs are now using CertifedEmail, accounting for 60 per cent of the US population. Goodmail - which takes up to 50 per cent of the revenue generated by the scheme - will for now only approve mail sent by companies and organisations that have been operational for a year or more. Ordinary users can still apply to be whitelisted by individual ISPs, which effectively provides the same trusted status.
David Meyer writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
What a load of twaddle!
Am I the *only* person who has realised that spammers will just add the 'sending fees' to the advertising rates they charge?
It will be just another business expense, like electricty or rent to them...
If it reduces spam by even 1% I'll eat my hat - with spam and brown sauce!
2. Simon
Oh look, yet another broken idea.
it won't actually reduce the spam being sent, but what it will do is allow clueless ISPs another excuse for dropping mail from 'third class' netizens.
3. N Welch
ISPs could *start* by simply enforcing HELO/EHLO checks on incoming emails.
If the domain "greeting" of an incoming email does not match up and originate from a fully-qualified domain name, then the mail is bounced... That would deal with a lot of these spam networks as well as the "zombies". That might also get the "IT"s of some of these poorly configured corporate mail networks to wake up and fix their mailserver config, too...
ISPs don't enforce this because there are so many poorly configured networks out there and they don't want to address the "why aren't I getting my mail from such-and-such" questions from Joe Consumer...
4. John
Isn't this entire concept rendered worthless due to the numerous hijacked "zombie" spam boxes set up using these ISPs' mail servers? Sounds like another way to make extra coin thanks to the lack of consumer knowledge.
5. Alan Clifford
So 60% of American citizens are cutting themselves of from the internet? Well, it's their choice. I'll say "Bye, bye" to them now if I may.
ps Talk about cutting yourself off from the internet. I tried to use a valid email address on this comment, alan+silicon.com@clifford.ac, but the broken validator on your website told me it was invalid. So I have used an invalid email address that you will accept. Doh!!!
Alan Clifford