No electronic communication medium is more widely used, abused or maligned than email. At once a superstar and a pariah of the Internet world, email has long lived in the sinister shadow of countless fraudsters and their thriving underground factory of scams. From spamming and phishing to pornography and international bank transfers, email’s reputation crisis has gotten out of hand.
An end to email woes might be in sight if reports of a new technology are anything to go by. Domainkeys Identified email (backed by Yahoo, Cisco, sendmail and PGP among others) uses “cryptographically secure digital signatures” to determine if a message is legitimate. Hopefully, the new technology will do to email what secure technologies and authentication services did to e-commerce!