Re: RE: Forwarders

At 07:01 AM 1/12/2004, Dr. Ernst Molitor wrote:
> IMHO, we have little choice but to accept some degree of spam. Along
> similar lines, we do accept traffic jams and don't forbid cars
> irrespective of the fact that without them, no jams would occur.
But to follow this analogy, we don't allow people to drive stolen cars or 
to drive with missing or fake license plates.  *That's* what SPF is about: 
identifying the cars pretending to be someone else so that they can be kept 
off the road.
The key thing to remember is that SPF is about blocking *forgeries*, not 
blocking *spam*.  Spammers like using forged addresses for a lot of 
reasons.  SPF takes away one of their tools.
Maybe you don't realize it, but a huge amount of spam is sent with forged 
addresses, and the impact of that falls squarely on the owner of the domain 
being forged.  When they were actually relaying through servers, you could 
control it directly by closing the relay, requiring authentication, 
etc.  When they send mail from fakeuser(_at_)speed(_dot_)net, suddenly speed.net's 
mail servers get inundated with bounce notices sent to accounts that don't 
exist.  Seriously - we get more bounce messages to nonexistent users than 
we get spam and non-spam combined.  If I watch the mail log, they just 
scroll by continuously.  We get several complaints a week from people who 
got spam claiming to be somebody(_at_)speed(_dot_)net(_dot_)  With current SMTP, there's 
nothing we can do to stop it.  SPF is the only solution *right now* that 
will cut into this without a complete overhaul of email.
SPF, if widely used, will help the victims of forgeries immensely.  Throw 
in things like widespread identify-theft through spoofing ("PayPal needs 
your SSN and credit card numbers now!"), and I'd say it's worth the 
inconvenience of requiring people to use their provider's mail servers.

Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net> 

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