spf-discuss
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Re: How to use SPF to reject spam

2005-04-06 11:27:56
At 10:59 AM 4/6/2005 -0400, Radu Hociung wrote:

If the content based filters allow 1 in 100,000 of these spam messages, and the success rate (actual sales) is 1 in 1,000, you have about 100 million DNS queries for one sale.

Scary !! And this is assuming only one DNS query per incoming spam. Multiply that by a typical 5 queries at each of 3 forwarders, and we see the true cost of p3nis pilz.

This will cost a few dollars, but likely the offender's registrar will pull the plug, due to violated agreement. So the SPF record goes away together with the domain.

If they don't pull the plug, IANA will probably revoke the registrar's license, as their activities places a huge load on the root servers, and does not benefit the Internet. This would be after they establish a reputation of being spammer-friendly.

I don't see the load on the root servers, and probably not even on the .com servers, since spamdomain.com will be in the cache after the first piece of spam arrives. The load will be from any subsequent authentication queries to <random>.spamdomain.com, and that will fall on the DNS server for spamdomain.com and all the forwarders and receivers along the spam's path.

The picture changes if this is a DoS attack, not a spammer who has no incentive to load DNS.

-- Dave
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