CheetahMail to Announce it is DomainKeys Compliant

CheetahMail, Experian’s e-mail service provider unit, is expected to announce today that it is fully compliant with the DomainKeys e-mail authentication specification.

The announcement means that CheetahMail is compliant with the three leading authentication solutions: DomainKeys, SPF and Sender ID.

As spam and phishing – where fraudulent e-mail purporting to be from a financial institution or other online merchant attempts to get consumers to provide their account numbers and passwords – cost ISPs more and more money to combat, Internet mailbox providers such as Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are increasing pressure on e-mail senders to authentication solutions.

E-Mail authentication attempts to fight e-mail forgery by verifying that the return address information in incoming e-mails’ headers are accurate.

If a mailbox provider’s authentication solution can’t validate the return address, it will flag the incoming mail as possible spam whether or not it came from a sender the mailbox holder has a relationship with.

Microsoft will begin sometime in November checking incoming e-mail using Sender ID. AOL supports SPF, which is part of Sender ID and considered the simplest to implement. Yahoo’s solution is DomainKeys. It is unclear when Yahoo will begin using DomainKeys to authenticate incoming e-mail.