Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired)

Posted Jan 20, 2004 21:24 UTC (Tue) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

if the problem can really be reduced down to a few spam friendly ISP's like this then you can blacklist these ISP's without getting into the current nightmare of blacklisting

Posted Jan 20, 2004 21:27 UTC (Tue) by sab39 (guest, #2185) [Link]

It doesn't, but it's pretty simple to blacklist emails whose sender address is one of those domains.

Since domains have non-zero cost and it'll take very little time for any new spam-friendly (sender-permitted-from-known-spam-IPs) domains to make it into blacklists, this is probably a significant increase in the cost of sending spam - get a new domain every day or two with appropriate SPFs.

This measure is basically intended to prevent spoofed email, which is a large proportion of spam and virus email. It doesn't (by itself) stop spam, but it makes it a lot easier to identify, trace, and control by other means.

Personally, I expect the effect on virus mail will be much greater than the effect on spam - that's usually very naive about email spoofing and would blatantly violate all SPF records whenever they're present for the spoofed domain.