Barking
In short this is a load of nonsense wrapped up with a bit of Web 2.crap badgers paws to try and sell people on a solution to a problem they dont have.
"Remember the days when you clicked on a link in an email without worrying about hitting a porn site or letting loose a virus?"
No, not really. If you have links there is a risk you will hit a porn site or virus. This is *more* prevalent with Web 2.0reah based tools then anything else.
"Technically, we have no good way of checking email. It comes with no guarantees whatsoever, explains Jim Galvin of Afilias. We just assume that it came from who it says it did because it says it did."
Like everything else. When I get a letter in the post from my bank, I assume it came from them - it might not have. Why cant we get better authentication controls on our snail mail?
The sender authenticity is not the greatest problem as it is arguably more likely a hostile source will hack your trusted colleague and then use their account to send you malware (twitter for example). Most spoofed spam / junk seems to pretend it has come from me - which is fairly easy to spot.
"The problem, adds Dave Crocker of Brandenburg InternetWorking, is that we have trained ourselves to look for bad behavior, and so we have ended up being ineffective at looking for good behavior. “The trust side of Internet world is not just flip-side of abuse,” Crocker argues. “They are two different things." "
Nonsense - we assume good behaviour and look for the bad stuff. Thats the problem. We could always assume the worst (which is a fairly effective solution) rather than buy into some more 2.0 crap.
"DKIM adds a signature that validates that an email that appears to come from example.com actually comes from example.com."
Wow. I feel like they have reinvented the wheel. Perfect Web 2.0 thinking.
The madness is how many people want anything other than plain text emails? Maybe include attachements (word doc... tee hee...) but thats about it. I used to help administer a mailing list and the vast majority of the 30,000 subscribers complained when a test HTML message was sent out. All we happier with plain text.
Thanks to online shopping I get a fair bit of "rich" email from shops - every single one gets ignored. Not because I am scared they are a scam (although...) but simply because my email is for information rich messages, not someones idea of a million spacer.gifs to show some pointless corporate branding in the proper place.