Misleading stats
Misleading stats
Posted Jul 15, 2005 15:49 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)In reply to: Misleading stats by pjs
Parent article: Spammers Most Likely Users Of E-Mail Authentication (TechWeb)
Reading that 9% of domains used SPF
I think you misparsed the sentence. It does give per centages of messages. It says, "... a sampling of 17.7 million messages ... 9 per cent [of those messages] from domains with published SPF records..."
And this means that AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail are sending very little email. Assuming they publish SPF records, at most 9% of email comes from those 3 domains combined.
The article doesn't mention how the study knows from what domain the mail comes, so I think we should assume it means the domain in the From: header. There's a big difference between saying email came from a domain that publishes SPF records and email came with a From: header identifying a domain that publishes SPF records. Much of my spam comes with a @yahoo.com From: header but does not come from Yahoo. Spammers do this for two reasons: 1) a per centage of it gets through anyway; and 2) they haven't kept up with the times.