The Domain Assurance Council (DAC) was formed in July 2006 to simplify organizations' access to certification and reputation services. DAC is dedicated to eliminating the confusion and complexity of disparate solution providers by providing a common way to publish information. Organizations that benefit from the DAC initiatives include those that:

• vouch for the owners of domain names,

• vouch for the types of email services that domain owners use, and

• vouch for those owners' conformance to good principles and good reputation in those email services.

DAC is actively working on a standard method for DAC's members to provide certification information for email so that receivers can be assured that the company or organization that says it is sending the mail is in fact responsible for that mail. A follow-on effort will provide common ways to publish more complex reputation information. By forming a cross-industry coalition of interested parties, DAC also hopes to:

• Promote the transition to domain level identity from the current IP based effort, and

• Further catalyze the adoption of DKIM.

See the protocol overview for more information on this standard and on DAC's plans for testing both DKIM in general and the new standard in specific.

Management team

The Council's management team consists of John Levine and Paul Hoffman.

John Levine

John has been active in anti-spam activities since 1996 and in the Internet engineering community since about 2001. He owns and operates a small network near Ithaca, New York, providing web hosting, e-mail, and other Internet services. He is the chair of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, participated in the MARID group, and is an active participant in the the IETF's DKIM Working Group. He is also active in ICANN as one of three North American representatives on the At-Large Advisory Committee.

Paul Hoffman

Paul has been active in the the Internet engineering community since 1994. He was director of the Internet Mail Consortium from 1996 to 2002, and has been the director of the VPN Consortium since 1999. He has been active in Internet standards development organizations since 1994, particularly in the IETF. He is currently the co-chair of the Atompub Working Group, and has previously been chair or co-chair of many Working Groups in the Applications and Security areas. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen standards-track RFCs, informational RFCs, and BCPs on topics including Internet mail, IPsec, cryptography, internationalized domain names, internationalization in general, and IETF processes. He has also been active in the Unicode Consortium since 2000 and intermittently active in ICANN since its inception.

Contact us

The Domain Assurance Council
Post Office Box 727
Trumansburg NY 14886 USA
+1 607 233 4182
info@domainassurance.org