San Francisco, May 21, 2010 – As an industry service, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the largest global anti-spam industry organization, has released its first online training video and is opening the technical training sessions at its next meeting to non-members for the first time, both at no cost. The new four-part tutorial by leading experts on DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is now available at the MAAWG website, and the live training courses on DNS security, complaint feedback loops, and DKIM at the MAAWG 19^th General Meeting in Barcelona, Spain, on June 7 will be open to the industry.

 

MAAWG is offering the free training to educate messaging professionals worldwide on the latest technologies to help prevent spam and fraudulent messages from reaching consumers. According to the organization’s email metrics reports (www.maawg.org/email_metrics_report), almost 90% of all email traffic is spam that is stopped before it reaches end-users’ inboxes. 

 

 “We’re facing an ever-escalating war with spam, phishing and email fraud. Recognizing the expertise that gathers at our members-only MAAWG meetings, we wanted to step up to the plate and make this knowledge more accessible to the global industry. The training will enable more messaging specialists to use these tools, and the more professionals capable of implementing advanced technologies, the better the email experience will be for all consumers,” said Michael O’Reirdan, MAAWG chairman.

 

Now available online, the free DKIM implementation video looks at this popular standard that allows an organization to take responsibility for a message by securely affixing a domain name to it.  This allows receivers to evaluate the reputation of the organization. Originally presented in February 2010, the tutorial is the first video in the MAAWG Training Series and runs one hour and 40 minutes. It is delivered in 20 to 35 minute segments covering theory and implementation that can be accessed at www.maawg.org/activities/training.

 

The DKIM video features Dave Crocker, MAAWG senior technical advisor and principal of Brandenburg InternetWorking, and Murray S. Kucherawy, Cloudmark principal engineer. Crocker has been instrumental in the adoption of the standard, and Kucherawy is the principal author of both Sendmail libdkim and OpenDKIM, the most widely used open source DKIM software.

 

All of the live training sessions at the MAAWG meeting on June 7 also will be taught by working professionals with extensive knowledge about the topic. In the past, the training sessions were only available to MAAWG members who attended the general meetings. The sessions now open to qualified non-members include:

 

-- DNSSEC (DNS Security) – Paul Vixie, ARIN chairman, Internet Systems Consortium president, and author of several RFCs on DNS, will unravel the technical complexities and outline a path to successful implementation of DNSSEC by highlighting some of the major obstacles and challenges.

 

-- Complaint Feedback Loop Implementation – will look at the technical and social aspects of FBL, from business costs and benefits to the operational issues of creating and using a feedback loop. Kate Nowrouzi, Fishbowl manager of ISP relations, and Heather Lord, a senior engineer in anti-abuse technology at a major ISP, will lead the session.

 

-- DKIM Theory and Implementation – The leading standard for adding trust back into email, this session will explain how DKIM works and how to plan a DKIM strategy, deploy it on email servers, and use it as a trust-based tool. Taught by Crocker and Kucherawy, it will include any updates since the video was made.

 

Industry professionals can request to attend the June training sessions in Barcelona by selecting “training” as the inquiry type on the “Contact Us” form at the MAAWG website, /contact_form, and sending a message specifying the session with the requestor’s name, company, title, phone number and email address.

More information on the courses is available at www.maawg.org/activities/training. The MAAWG 19^th General Meeting will be held June 8-10 in Barcelona. The three-day event following the training is open to members-only and will focus on mobile platforms. (Meeting details are in a May 18 MAAWG news release.)

 

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is where the messaging industry comes together to work against spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. MAAWG (www.maawg.org) represents almost one billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators worldwide. It is the only organization addressing messaging abuse holistically by systematically engaging all aspects of the problem, including technology, industry collaboration and public policy. MAAWG leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., MAAWG is an open forum driven by market needs and supported by major network operators and messaging providers.

 

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Media Contact: Linda Marcus, APR, +1-714-974-6356, LMarcus@astra.cc, Astra Communications

 

MAAWG Board of Directors: AOL; AT&T (NYSE: T); Cloudmark, Inc.; Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA); Cox Communications; Eloqua; France Telecom (NYSE and Euronext: FTE); Goodmail Systems; Openwave Systems (NASDAQ: OPWV); Time Warner Cable; Verizon Communications; and Yahoo! Inc.

 

MAAWG Full Members: 1&1 Internet AG; Apple Inc.; Bizanga LTD; Cisco Systems, Inc.; Constant Contact (CTCT); e-Dialog; Experian CheetahMail; Genius.com; Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ NASDAQ: IIJI); McAfee Inc.; PayPal; Return Path, Inc.; Spamhaus; Sprint; Symantec; and Zynga, Inc.

 

A complete member list is available at /about/roster.