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  • From: Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Send Policy Framework?
  • Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 10:37:01 -0400

on Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 10:18:09AM -0400, Michael Czeiszperger wrote:
> http://www.openspf.org/
>
> I was wondering what the word was on this spam reduction initiative.

Unfortunately, it's not a spam reduction initiative. It was oversold as
such, but at root it's just an authentication mechanism, and a badly
broken one at that. AFAICT, DomainKeys and DKIM are the only things
going now, with MSFT's SenderID (which borged SPF) basically taking up
the hype slack. DomainKeys is what people are using now, and DKIM is the
"next gen that fixes everything" that nobody is adopting because it's
not there yet and DomainKeys is.

Hint: anyone can publish an SPF record, and they can say the domain
allows email to be sent from anywhere. It doesn't mean much. And nothing
can stop a spammer from publishing an SPF record. Also, SPF breaks a
common form of email forwarding. Suresh Ramasubramanian (antispam guy at
Outblaze) removed their SPF records many months ago. It's a dead letter.
(Or would that be "dead.tla"?)

FWIW, I tried SPF on a few domains I host, and it made no difference at
all to me or to the spam sent forged as being from that domain. None.
I don't use DK or DKIM or SPF.

> Verizon is rejecting email sent from my company and asking us if we
> have SPF records.

Erm, that's stupid - they can check whether you have SPF records. It's
a DNS thing. If Verizon is rejecting for lack of SPF, they're idiots.
But I guess that's been shown over and over, anyway - between blocking
email from "europe" and reflecting abuse on everyone else via their
broken sender verification scheme, I'm not surprised they're refusing
mail based on SPF.

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