Contrary to the promotions, SPF will not stop spam.
Who is promoting SPF as an anti-spam solution? I'd really like to know.
Let's take a look at http://spf.pobox.org. Hey, look what it says:
SPF is ushering in a new set of anti-spam systems, where email is
spam unless proven otherwise.
If history is any guide, some SPF fan will write back in a huff and
say "That doesn't say SPF is an anti-spam solution! It just says that
SPF is holding a flashlight and will lead the actual anti-spam
solutions to their seats!"
This kind of disingenuous doubletalk has characterized SPF advocacy
since its beginning, and is one of the many reasons that the
mainstream e-mail tech community holds SPF in disdain. That along
with its egregious design mistakes and its irreparably enormous error
rate, of course.
SPF can help whitelist mail from fixed source senders you already
know. That's what AOL uses it for, and it's an adequate if overly
complex means to that end. If the SPF crowd promoted it for that
purpose, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. But they
don't and the smoke long ago became unbreathable.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web