WebProNews

The two technology companies have collaborated on joining their respective e-mail authentication solutions.

The resulting system, called DomainKeys Identified Mail, aims to stop e-mail forgery and identify legitimate messages. And the companies have made the system available royalty-free to the industry.

DomainKeys uses public key encryption to fulfill the mission of securing e-mail. An e-mail message arrives with an encrypted signature in the header. The receiving system uses the public key to verify the signature.

The process will be familiar to users of the PGP public key encryption product. But DomainKeys doesn't encrypt the entire message. It only provides the encrypted signature generated from a sender's private key.

Other companies like Microsoft and AOL have been developing e-mail authentication schemes as well. Their products can work with DomainKeys, but they and others will continue work on their solutions.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.