SPF is not the solution
Posted Jan 29, 2004 13:19 UTC (Thu) by
job (guest, #670)
Parent article:
Going Upstream to Fight Spam (Wired)
It seems to me most of the people supporting SPF haven't spent very much
time in an ISPs abuse department or writing MTA software. Spam is illegal
and does at many times involve sending out viruses with backdoor software
to Outlook users and scanning nets for known vulnerabilities. The only
solutions that has proven good over time is blacklisting of known spammers
and open proxies/relays IPs, and end-user statistical filters.
Spammers will just increase the use of end-users computers and abuse
whitelisted relays. Remember that there are customers behind this who pay
for this to happend. The spammers who don't shift will rapidly see their
customers move to the ones who do.
SPF does not handle the spam problem. (I personally believe no single
solution ever will: We can't have super cheap mail service and not having
it misused.) is a remedy for 'joe-jobs', which is mailer-daemon (sometimes
spam) replies to innocent people whose addresses has been used as
return-path. This is a very good goal in itself, but SPF is the wrong
solution because it comes at the price of breaking mail forwarding. It's
simply not worth it.
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