spf-discuss
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Re: SPF and reputation schemes

2004-01-09 18:46:22
On Friday 09 January 2004 7:30 pm, Dan Nadir wrote:
What does this do to any notion of a reputation scheme? Won't the world 
quickly polarize into 100% good, and everything else? Who's reputation 
would you be looking at? Because these outbound IP addresses now serve 
multiple organizations, do they end up with, in essence, the reputation of 
the least reputable organization who uses them?

In an SPF world you would not need to map IP->reputation since if SPF 
authorizes a host to send mail from a domain, you can treat the mail as 
originating from either the return-path domain or individual mailbox for 
reputation purposes.

If your reputation system regards domain owners as responsible for their 
user's behaviour, keep scores for just the domain part of the return-path 
mailbox. This is a good fit with personal or corporate sending domains that 
do not provide mail service to third parties, as their employees (and robots) 
are agents for the company.

OTOH, if your reputation system regards individual users as responsible for 
their own behaviour, keep scores for the full return-path mailbox. This is a 
good fit with sending domains that provide mail service to third parties, 
like hotmail, most ISP's, etc.

The basic reputation-maintenance problems are the same either way (throwaway 
domains or throwaway mailboxes) although the latter would require a far 
larger database.

Personally I would like to see a highly distributed and decentralised 
reputation system that permits domain owners to decide it they wish to be 
scored per-mailbox or whole-domain whilst being immune to gaming and 
operating transparently with zero explicit user-level maintenance. 
Decentralizing such a system is probably the hardest bit, though 'distributed 
hash tables' springs to mind...

- Dan

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