Electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become a fundamental enabling technology for businesses. Increasingly, e-mail is relied on for day to day communications between people located all over the world. Many kinds of commercial activity are now being performed over the Internet. In order for such activities to be dependably provided, Internet communications must be trusted. In this regard, e-mail spoofing, in which a malicious party creates a “rogue” e-mail message that appears to be from another party, or from an organization or associated domain other than the one it is actually transmitted from, is a serious problem. Domain Name System (DNS) servers can sometimes be attacked and used for this purpose, and there is currently no convenient mechanism for timely detection of a server having been compromised, and for preventing the transmission of rogue e-mail messages.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new system for enabling a service provider, such as an ISP (Internet Service Provider), to provide improved security with regard to detecting and preventing rogue e-mail messages resulting from e-mail spoofing.