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Re: Lawsuits, angry business users, and SPF stupidity.

2004-01-13 12:13:39
On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 12:01:38AM +1100, Chris Drake wrote:

| Hi Anthony,
| 
| FINALLY someone who "gets it".
| 
| Continuing your analogy - I own a "horse stable" business.  That's why
| I hate SPF.  It threatens me, and it threatens everyone with horses
| too.
| 
| The only difference here is that unlike cars and horses in real life,
| the cars and horses in our email world are both just as good as each
| other, and your SPF idea is proposing to kill all the horses,
| regardless of whether or not a spammer is riding upon them (and
| incidentally, it lets all the cars go past regardless of whether a
| spammer is driving or not).

SPF is not mandatory.  Domain owners can choose to not publish SPF data
and then the default actions continue to take place.  MTA operators can
choose to not utilize published SPF data, and things will continue for
them as before (including higher spam loads and possible lost email due
to occaisional overloads and downtime).


| You should be combatting SPAM with SPF - you should not be combatting
| one small and (if SPF were to be implemented) unlikely aspect that
| some spams may exhibit (and that many non-spams will also exhibit).

Forged sender email address is not a small aspect.  It is a major problem
that SPF will kick in the butt.


| If you hate spam so much, go and get a www.mailblocks.com account. it
| will block all your junk and you'll never miss anything legitimate,
| and nobody else will have to suffer your SPF's collateral damage.

Yeah right.  My spam leakage was below 0.3% last year.  And that is without
using any content filtering at all.  Lately, the leakage has gone up and is
now around 2%.  Half of that is due to Cable/DSL trojans, which I am adding
new blocks for all the time.  The other half is due to spammers constantly
hopping around to various hosting providers (many of whom exist solely to
reap from the spammer trade).  In MOST cases, they are forging sender email
addresses.  SPF, once well deployed, will let me quench a huge amount of
this spam and avoid the collateral damage that would otherwise exist if I
just blocked the various domains the spammers are forging (such as aol.com,
hotmail.com, etc).

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