i Team Editor’s note: I liked this article because E-mail is a daily routine for most of us. This article examines how safe our e-mail really is and what we can do to prevent viruses. Anyone who uses e-mail a lot could benefit from this article.

The world's e-mail network is no longer the friendly place it once was. The booming trade in spam and the looming threat of e-mail fraud, in the form of spoofing and phishing, have seriously dented our confidence in e-mail. Despite a multimillion-dollar industry surrounding anti-spam software and several attempts to banish the problem with regulation, spammers and fraudsters continue to stay one step ahead.

The problem is that SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the protocol designed to move e-mails from server to server, is still a system based on trust. Anyone submitting a message can claim to be anyone else, with little or no accountability.

Enter e-mail authentication. During the past year, the industry has keenly watched the progress of various sender-authentication schemes designed to ensure that all senders--including businesses, Internet service providers and, most important, spammers--are held responsible for the messages they send. E-mail authentication tells us where mail comes from so we can decide whether we want to read it.

The government has also recognized the importance. The Federal Trade Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology hosted the Email Authentication Summit recently at which industry leaders met to discuss what progress had been made to date, as well as the future of authentication.

On a practical level, companies should develop plans as to how to incorporate authentication into their current infrastructure, and they should ask their e-mail vendors how and when they plan to take advantage of authentication. Every receiving site will have to decide for itself which sender authentication approaches to take and what requirements to place on incoming mail in order to best suit its needs. But companies should also expect their customers, partners and suppliers to use a variety of schemes, or risk being unable to exchange messages with whole segments of their supply chain. The "industry" can only support e-mail authentication--it's now up to individual businesses to make it happen.

 Source:  http://news.com.com

  Fred Harteis is president of i Team.

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