Trent Adams's Library tagged authentication →  View Popular

The second approach involves a published list, but is much more modest than an all-out certification service. Affiliation Lists (AffiL) is a proposal that Jeff MacDonald, of e-Dialog, and I developed:

"Typically, an affiliation list merely documents an existing relationship, whereas quality assessment statements are the result of incremental and subjective work by the publisher. Hence, affiliations are more easily documented. In terms of using the publication information for performing decision-making by the consumer, the utility of an affiliations list is based on having the consumer of the list perform the quality assessment step, rather than the publisher." (See specification)

Imagine a list published by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) of member organizations or one for licensed pharmacists. Membership already exists, even if it is not already published. Such a list would indicate domain names registered to a member. Anything signed under one of these domain names would mean that the signing organization had an affiliation that could be meaningful for a receiver's message handling analysis. The lists do not certify email quality by the signer, but they do provide useful input. While membership would not automatically mean that a receiver should trust the message, it ought to mean a higher level of safety than stray messages coming in from the world of mistrust.