Re: [spf-discuss] Re: advice wrong, or is it?

Julian Mehnle wrote:
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> Bill Adragna wrote:
>   
> > I've been following this for years, and somebody tell me,
> > what will prevent the spammers from getting a valid SPF record for
> > themselves, thus blowing up the whole point of the SPF record? 
> >     
> There seems to be a misunderstanding.  The point of SPF is not to stop 
> spam but to stop sender address forgery.  If spammers set up SPF records 
> for their own domains (which is of course what they have been doing for 
> years), then we can authenticate mails from their domains with confidence 
> and blacklist their domains.  All the better.
> If you want to stop spam, please try SpamAssassin or some other anti-spam 
> solution.
>   
I know you know this Julian, but it needs to be said.

Lets not put SPF down too much, in the act of stopping forgery, a lot of 
spam (and virus generated email) that is forgery gets stopped in the 
process.
Consider the spammers who forge email as from "good" or common domains.  
One cannot block all emails from certain common domains, so we need to 
differentiate between the ones that REALLY come from those domains and 
ones that do NOT come from those domains but pretend to.
For a simple case that's easy to see, how many of you have received or 
still receive spam that claimed to be from someone at your own domain 
but didn't (e.g. claimed to come from YOU at your domain).
If you publish the appropriate SPF record, you can swiftly block those 
emails, no false positives (The woodenheaded corner case of blind 
.forward'ing email not withstanding, since its irrelevant to 99.9999% of 
the world)
Terry


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