E-mail provider Everyone.net is trying to head off one type of spam with an encryption technology designed to create a unique
signature for each outbound e-mail message.
The Total Protection 2.0 e-mail protection service zeros in on bounce storms, in which e-mail users who have had their e-mail
address stolen by spammers or e-mail worms receive a flood of returned messages.
The service, being launched this week at the ISPCon conference in Washington, includes a technology dubbed Email Fingerprint,
which adds an extension header to each outbound e-mail message. That header will contain a unique signature, created with
a symmetric encryption key and based on information such as the e-mail user's ID, the time stamp for the e-mail and more,
said Wayne Lewis, Everyone.net CTO.
External e-mail servers typically return the header, including the new fingerprint extension, and often a portion of the original
message. That allows Everyone.net to search bounced messages for the signature to determine whether they came from an Everyone.net
user, or are bogus bounce messages from a spammer, Lewis said.
The new technology is not a cure-all, but will help shield Everyone.net's customers from being inundated with rejection notifications
for e-mail messages they never sent, according to Josh Mailman, vice president of sales and marketing at Everyone.net
Bounced messages are a big problem, according to John Levine of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group.
Levine, who runs an anti-spam service called AbuseNet, receives around 10,000 or 20,000 a day. However, Email Fingerprint
might not reliably let legitimate bounce messages through to e-mail users, he said.
E-mail server products vary widely in what content from original e-mail messages they return when they issue a bounce notice.
That variance could mean that Email Fingerprint is stripped out or altered by some programs, causing it to be dropped by Everyone.net's
servers.
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