As we told you in one of our previous articles, Cisco Systems has developed, together with Yahoo, an anti-spam technology that has the purpose of identifying and comparing email addresses, in order to establish exactly who has sent a certain message.

The technology attaches a digital signature to the emails such that the recipients will be able to verify whether the message really comes from the source pointed out in the email. It is hoped that by using this technology, the level of spam messages will decrease due to the marking of legal emails.

And it looks like the first steps towards the adoption of this technology have already been made, because the two companies, together with the software developers Sendmail and PGP have sent the specifications of the DomainKeys Identified Mail solution to the Internet Engineering Task Force, an organization issuing Internet standards. IETF will start analyzing the DomainKeys issue towards the end of the month, a Yahoo representative said.

By adding the DKIM solution, which is based on encrypted public codes, to a digital signature attached to each message, the recipients could be sure of the identity of the message's sender.

The standardization of this solution represents the crucial step towards its large scale implementation, and it looks like some other companies interested in this subject (Alt-N Technologies, America Online, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign) will join this effort quite shortly.