New email filtering standard might reduce scams greatly

We all hate getting spam or suspicious solicitations via email, which is why it’s good news that Internet service providers (ISPs) AOL, Comcast, Google and Yahoo last week introduced a way to keep unwanted messages out of your inbox. But it could be months if not years before you notice a dramatic reduction in spam, because most companies don’t use the voluntary authentication standard.

The ISP heavyweights and 11 other companies that rely on Internet technology collaborated to create an email authentication standard called domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance, or DMARC. The DMARC standard will allow ISPs to identify legitimate emails that come from financial institutions, online payment-service providers and even social-networking services, according to Patrick Peterson, who is CEO of Agari, a founding contributor to DMARC.

You don’t have to do anything to make DMARC work. It’s just a matter of ISPs trying to block from your inbox emails that come from unauthenticated sources, such as potential scammers, Peterson says. In other words, before you receive an email from, for instance, PayPal (which was one of the first companies to use DMARC), an ISP will use the DMARC standard to verify that the email really comes from PayPal’s servers rather than a dubious origin.

The DMARC standard is a step in the right direction toward eliminating the threat of spam or phishing emails that attempt to get access to your personal information. But we believe that it will be impossible to make all of those email threats obsolete anytime soon because only a few companies have implemented the standard: Bank of America, Facebook, Fidelity Investments, LinkedIn and Microsoft.

Craig Spiezle, who is an executive director at Online Trust Alliance, says most people won’t notice an immediate reduction in the amount of spam. But he says you might see a significant drop if more companies use DMARC to verify the legitimacy of an email. However, it’s unclear how long it will take to get more companies to use the verification standard.

Today, about 5 out of every 100 spam emails sneak past filters and into your inbox, says Ben Ramirez, who is an Internet security analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

Peterson believes that DMARC has the potential to reduce this number by another 90 percent.

– K. Fanuko