Re: SPF deployment, was RFC 3929 on Alternative Decision ...

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 04:15:02AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
> > > The amount of mail going through SPF tests is still small, and only a few
> > > aggressively wacky sites block mail that fails SPF.
> > With the release of SA3.0, this is likely changing.
> Small amount of mail tested, or few wacky sites?  Both, I suppose.
>
> If people really are doing tests of SPF or Sender ID or other similar
> schemes, I'd be most interested in hearing about the results,
> particularly numbers of how much legit mail is tagged valid or
> invalid, how much spam is tagged valid or invalid, and how spammers
> are adapting/ Ciphertrust says they've seen more spam than good mail
> pass SPF checks.  That doesn't surprise me, but their numbers were so
> small that I'd like to see some confirmation.
For what it's worth, we've been running an end user support system for
spf for about 3 weeks now. We have had about 4 requests from people who
had their mail blocked by spf checking sites (and wrongly, as our
subsequent investigations showed). That's out of a 30-40 requests coming
in in total.

I myself have been checking spf for months now, and never had someone
complain about not getting through. Granted, email is not my core
business and volume is relatively low. Most spam is stopped by other
checks anyway. SPF is not an anti-spam solution.

Koen

-- 
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
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