(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Email authentication and reputation management services provider Return Path (www.returnpath.net) has beta launched Domain Assurance, an audit and registry service aimed at battling phishing and spoofing by enabling the widespread use of email authentication protocols.
Email authentication promised to end phishing and spoofing by giving businesses a way to identify their email and giving mailbox providers a means to block malicious email that pretended to be from a well-known brand, however, many companies have struggled to implement the standards correctly or consistently. In turn, mailbox providers have been unable to unilaterally block unauthenticated email for fear that consumers would not receive wanted email.
According to Return Path’s Wednesday announcement, the Domain Assurance service’s approach to dealing with this situation starts with auditing all email streams to determine if they are properly authenticated. With that knowledge, Return Path can help companies authenticate all their email, whether it’s corporate, transactional, marketing, or anything else. The company’s domains then go onto a registry and any improperly authenticated email coming from that domain can be blocked by mailbox providers with confidence. Registered companies will also receive immediate notification of spoofing and phishing attacks to their brands. In turn, ISPs and other mailbox providers will be able to protect their customers from phished emails pretending to be from registered companies.
The service leverages its existing relationships with top service providers such as Yahoo!, Comcast and Tucows to include the use of Domain Assurance, bringing the product’s coverage at launch to nearly 400 million mailboxes worldwide. Currently in beta, Domain Assurance’s commercial launch is planned for the third quarter of 2010. Also, carrier-grade messaging infrastructure and security provider Cloudmark (www.cloudmark.com) will make the service available to its customers who service more than a billion users worldwide.
“We want to remove the hurdles that businesses face in implementing authentication protocols so that they can fulfill their promise to improve the health of the email ecosystem,” said George Bilbrey, President, Return Path.
Mark Risher, head of product management and “Spam Czar” for Yahoo! Mail, said the company is a proponent of DomainKeys Identified Mail, a method for email authentication that lets an organization take responsibility for a message it has sent in a way that it can be validated by a recipient, which can serve as an added security barrier for its nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail accounts worldwide. “We look forward to working with companies like Return Path to further help spread the adoption of domain keys technology across the industry and further reduce the number of spammers and phishing threats,” he said.
