[NCLUG] spam help

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 10:00:53PM -0600, Jake Edge wrote:
>it is fairly disingenuous to suggest that lack of SRS support at a 
>forwarding MTA is simply a misconfiguration ...

Again, there are lots of things a user can do to cause their e-mail to
sleep with the fishes.  If your receiving mail server does SPF, and you
don't forward mail to it properly, I don't think it's entirely incorrect to
say it's a configuration issue.

>SRS requires that the MTA be altered to implement it ...

SRS does *NOT* require any changes to the MTA, even in qmail it can be
implemented without changes to qmail.  It does require that the admin
configure the system for it though.

>and as i said in the other note, 
>widespread adoption, because of resistance to envelope sender rewriting, 
>is a long way off (if ever) ...

SPF is used by a *LOT* of senders.  Of the domain names I've had send
e-mail to me in the last month, 437 had no SPF, 97 with SPF.  A lot of
those are names like 10.9.8.7.comcast.net, so it's a pretty simple count.

Contrary to the reports about spammers using SPF, I took a sample of a
bunch of obviously spam domains (1-800-viagra.com), and only around 8% of
them had SPF records.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 I'm one of the leading experts in the field of Data Mimeing.  Unfortunately,
 I'm not allowed to TELL you anything about it.  -- Sean Reifschneider, 1997
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability