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Wariness About Spam Leads to `Certified E-Mail' Service

Posted on: Wednesday, 8 March 2006, 06:00 CST

SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Daina Avizonis has learned to approach her inbox with a wariness normally characteristic of members of a bomb squad. The 41-year-old Redwood City, Calif., scientist scans the name of each sender, and if it is not someone she recognizes _ like her mother _ she zaps the message.

"I don't open it at all," she said.

To the dismay of mass marketers, many ordinary e-mail users take similar precautions, making it increasingly difficult for legitimate companies and nonprofits to conduct effective e-mail campaigns.

In response, AOL and Yahoo, two of the world's largest e-mail providers, have said they will roll out an authentication service described as "certified e-mail" in the coming months.

The service, which will be provided to AOL and Yahoo by GoodmailSystems, will attach cryptographic "tokens" to e-mails belonging to senders whose legitimacy has been verified by GoodmailSystems employees.

Senders will pay between one cent and one-quarter of one cent for each certified message.

The tokens mark the message for delivery to the inbox and ensure they will not get trapped by a spam filter. In the inbox, they are tagged with a small graphic image that distinguishes them from regular mail.

Certified messages are scheduled to start showing up in the inboxes of the 26 million people who use AOL sometime in the next month or so. Yahoo said its service is not expected to start until later in the year and that it will be used primarily for e-mails involving some sort of financial transaction _ such as a bank account statement or purchase receipt.

Richard Gingras, chief executive at Mountain View, Calif.-based GoodmailSystems, said a rigorous background check of senders will prevent spammers from becoming customers. Under the system, people can still independently decide that someone is a spammer and route their mail to a spam folder. However, they are encouraged to either unsubscribe from that mailing list or inform their e-mail provider or GoodmailSystems about any problem senders.

"For the consumer it's great because it's going to stand out as an e-mail that you instantly know is trustworthy, legitimate and authentic," said Nicholas J. Graham, an AOL spokesman. "For commercial senders of e-mails, it's a way to have your e-mail handled and delivered in a special way that stands out in the e-mail inbox."

But the proposed service has become increasingly controversial as activist organizations like MoveOn.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have launched a campaign to stop what they describe as "an e-mail tax."

Certified e-mail is "the first step down the slippery slope toward dividing the Internet into two classes of users _ those who get preferential treatment and those who are left behind," MoveOn.org warned in an e-mail message to its members on Feb. 22. "The very existence of online civic participation and the free Internet as we know it are under attack."

The anti-AOL coalition has since expanded to include political groups from both sides of the political spectrum, as well as for-profit businesses.

AOL's Graham said MoveOn.org is misrepresenting the service, which will not affect the way AOL currently differentiates between good mail and bad mail. Specifically, Graham said AOL will continue a program that identifies good senders, and allows their e-mails to be delivered.

Graham noted that MoveOn.org, a political group founded in Berkeley, has grown to national prominence thanks to its savvy use of e-mail _ and to the efforts of providers like AOL to keep e-mail inboxes safe.

Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications products at Yahoo, said the service simply adds one more layer of reassurance for its 67 million e-mail users. Yahoo already marks e-mails coming from verified domains with the tiny image of a key.

That service, which is free, relies on technology developed by Yahoo and Cisco Systems, the San Jose Internet router giant. Another free system of verification, known as SENDER ID, was set up by Microsoft in 2004.

E-mail and Internet service providers also work with companies like Return Path, of New York City, and Habeas, of Mountain View, who sell accreditation services that, in essence, help their customers get identified as good senders.

Experts in computer security and e-mail practices say these efforts have largely solved the problem of identifying spam, but that identity theft through e-mail, sometimes called phishing, has been harder to stop. Phishing attacks generally replicate a secure-looking Web site or e-mail that ask for your login or password information, which is then stolen.

Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security, said he doubted the certified e-mail service proposed by GoodmailSystems would be effective. Schneier said most people who use e-mail would not differentiate between an e-mail marked by a certified stamp and one that wasn't.

Sara Radicati, president of The Radicati Group, a market research firm that closely follows e-mail, said the service seemed to be a roundabout way for e-mail providers to generate revenue from their free services.

"The absolute last reason we are doing this is to try to increase revenue," Garlinghouse responded. "We believe it is a new way that we can further protect our users."

Still some people said they weren't interested in a service whose main goal was to help separate marketers _ good or bad.

"We didn't like telemarketing, and I sort of feel the same way about all that garbage in my e-mail," said Avizonis.

___

(c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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