[NCLUG] spam help

[Jake Edge]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 05:17:51PM -0600, Jake Edge wrote:
>> unfortunately, there are quite a number of technical problems with SPF 
>> that render it largely useless, see, for instance:
>>
>> http://david.woodhou.se/why-not-spf.html
> 
> This link seems to be a few printed pages which say "It breaks forwarding".

'breaks forwarding' is a pretty powerful argument ...

> A lot of these objections seem to come from people who don't use SPF.
> I've been using SPF for several years, and it works.  I'm quite happy to
> have a way to take control back for my domain.

Unfortunately, SPF does not provide you any control over your domain ... 
it allows you to publish information about where your domain sends mail 
from, it leaves it up to others to decide whether to do anything about 
it (or even check it) ...

if someone forges a tummy.com address on a spam message, any that get 
sent to non-SPF checking hosts have the potential to bounce ...

domains that do strict SPF checking (presumably yours for instance) may 
reject perfectly legitimate forwarded email ...

<potentially_shameless_self_promotion>

some of this may be described better in an LWN article that I wrote:

http://lwn.net/Articles/187736/

</potentially_shameless_self_promotion>

i think that SPF means well, but i don't think it actually solves any 
problems and it breaks standard email practice of 20 years or more ...

jake


-- 
Jake Edge - jake at edge2.net - http://www.edge2.net