Yahoo and Cisco to battle spam with DKIM

Cisco and Yahoo are cooperating on a new technology called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to fight spam. The companies said they will release the DKIM technology to the industry royalty-free.

DKIM uses public key cryptography to allow users to verify the e-mail and identify legitimate messages by pinpointing the sender's domain. It will also use DNS to identify the sender.

Initially the companies will target banks, utilities and e-commerce services with the DKIM technology. Cisco said e-mail fraud is a huge problem nowadays which costs companies millions of dollars in direct losses, technology expenditures, lost productivity and even network downtimes.