Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired) [LWN.net]

Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired)

Posted Jan 21, 2004 18:23 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
In reply to: Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired) by nowster
Parent article: Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired)

No one is pretending that this one can be implemented without various other aspects of the mail infrastructure requiring upgrade. The reason that 4000 domains have already published SPF records, with this number doubling every few weeks, is because the current infrastructure is being increasingly trashed by the spammers. I for one can no longer guarantee that all of my wanted incoming mail will be looked at any more (false positive spam detects), or that all of the 200 mails rejected by my system daily will be bounced (I don't want to hassle those whose legitimate addresses are forged on the spam I receive).

There will be users such as those you describe who will need some kind of authenticated SMTP relay service, or SMTP after POP. Those who send out mail for one ISP account from another ISP's dialup are likely to be smart enough to figure out how to upgrade to authenticated SMTP for outbound mail using the appropriate relay. Using a dialup machine for direct to MX mail is a bad idea, as it is likely to result in blocks from existing blacklists . These who don't want to know how to upgrade are likely to prefer to use web mail anyway which shouldn't be adversely affected.

Yes a few of the less competent ISPs who can't be bothered to upgrade will probably go out of business. Question of not being able to make omlettes without breaking some eggs.

What is likely to be a more significant problem is that mail forwarding will break and needs more significant redesign at the MTA level i.e. to rewrite the envelope headers of forwarded mail so as to create a reasonable path for bounces. Interestingly, one of the companies most active in introducing SPF is a legitimate mail-forwarding company ( pobox.com ).

SPF is being rapidly adopted because it is likely to lead to an immediate improvement for those who are worst affected by spam and by having their email identities stolen by spammers.

(Log in to post comments)