Dot-Mail Domain Proposed as Spam Solution

[<bleeding_heart>]

The next weapon in the war against junk e-mail could be built into the core of the Internet's inner workings if a group of anti-spam vigilantes gets its way.

The weapon in question is called "dot-mail," a proposed new Internet domain like dot-com or dot-org. If approved by the Internet's addressing authority, direct mailers and other companies could use it to send their e-mails straight to users' in-boxes without fear that they will be quarantined or discarded by software filters that confuse those e-mails with spam.

"What we're trying to create is a zone on the Internet where mail flows -- where the airlines and Amazons and eBays can send mail and it will arrive cleanly," said John Reid, a spokesman for Spamhaus, a Britain-based nonprofit company trying to reduce the amount of spam online.

A dot-mail domain is a kind of "white list," techie parlance for a compilation of Internet addresses that ISPs and system administrators know is trustworthy. Companies with dot-mail addresses would have to ask e-mail recipients not only for their permission to send them material, but also a confirmation generated by the recipient.

It is the opposite approach of "blacklists," which ISPs use to automatically reject e-mails that come from Internet domains known for generating spam. Spamhaus maintains one of the most widely used blacklists.

Blacklists are popular but have the unintended effect of trapping legitimate e-mail messages. Not only that, people whose domains wind up on blacklists often have a hard time getting off them again because some blacklist operators keep their contact information hidden. Others often are reticent to remove names from their lists.

But dot-mail is facing several hurdles that stand between it and reality. One of the steepest is price. Compared to the $6 wholesale rate for a dot-com address, the $2,000 wholesale asking price is a steep one. Reid said the hefty annual fee would pay for Spamhaus to review all dot-mail applicants to insure that they are not spammers.

"It's not going to be spam if it's coming from dot-mail, so the problems drop away very quickly," he said.

More uncertain is whether the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- the nonprofit group that supervises the online addressing system -- will approve dot-mail's creation. ICANN is considering the dot-mail bid, along with proposals to create domains such as dot-tel, dot-travel and dot-xxx.

Spokesman Kieran Baker said ICANN will approve at least some of the domains later this year, but declined to comment on the status of individual bids.

Source

Edited April 9, 2004 by <bleeding_heart>