Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo

Last Friday, Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, representing over a 50% premium from Yahoo's then-share price.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is a good deal, and what Microsoft's true motivations are for buying Yahoo (namely, to become the number 2 player in the search market), I'd like to look at it from an anti-spam point of view.  What are some of the things that the two companies can do to work together from an email delivery vantage?  Here are some of the things that I can see:

  1. Spam filtering algorithms - Hotmail's Smartscreen technology could use some improvements, I don't think anyone in Hotmail disagrees.  I'd like to see Microsoft and Yahoo get together and combine the best of Smartscreen and Yahoo filtering to improve the product.

  2. DKIM implementation - There hadn't been a major movement within Microsoft to do DKIM.  Not that anyone was opposed to it, but there was a big push to do SenderID.  Now that Microsoft is acquiring the guys who invented DomainKeys, the predecessor to DKIM, maybe we'll now start supporting it.  It makes sense to do it now.

  3. Get Yahoo to do SPF - Yahoo so far has refused to publish SPF records.  Microsoft is very big on getting customers to publish SPF.  Maybe now we can get Yahoo to finally do it.

Of course, the downside to this is that I can't make fun or criticize Yahoo anymore.  Wait a minute, yes I can, I just have to do it quickly before Yahoo accepts the bid.