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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Internet portal Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday released an e-mail standard that prevents "spam" marketers from hiding unwanted messages behind legitimate e-mail addresses.

The technique, if widely adopted, could help Internet providers more easily block the unwanted bulk messages that currently account for up to two-thirds of all e-mail traffic.

Yahoo's proposed standard, known as DomainKeys, would embed outgoing messages with an encrypted digital signature matched to a signature on the server computer that sends the message.

Internet providers could check the signatures on incoming messages and block those that do not match up.

The procedure would be invisible to regular e-mail users because it would be implemented by e-mail providers, Yahoo said on a Web page describing the standard at (http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys).

Internet providers deploy a barrage of filters to weed out spam and large providers like Time Warner Inc.'s America Online block up to 2.5 billion spam e-mails each day.

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Source: Reuters