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Re: SPF abused by spammers

2004-09-12 15:33:22

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Peter Bowyer wrote:


But AOL won't have spammers on their whitelist. The only domains for which
an SPF Pass means less filtering are those which are pre-whitelisted. And
SPF will ensure that mail which appears to be from those domains isn't
forged.

This is a false assumption.  Any domain that is whitelisted will attract 
spammers to that domain.  There is no domain or ISP that can claim not to 
have spammers ever.

Whether you use SPF as the reduced testing mechanism or some other
mechanism is irrelevant. The 'bad thing' is to ever subject some mail to
less filtering.

What's your problem with this? It's using SPF for exactly what it was
intended, and the fact that spammers publish SPF will have no effect on it
at all.

SPF has no effect on anything except to interfere with legitimate email
unbundling.  SPF allows MSN and AOL to conspire to prevent email
outsourciing, or to charge the outsourcers for the "privelege" of having
an SPF record, or to interfere with such outsourced email by having
unreliable nameservice for the outsourced SPF records.  In exchange, SPF
has no impact on spam, whatsoever.  Thats my problem with SPF.


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