Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts

Mon Sep 6 23:19:01 UTC 2004

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Paul Vixie wrote:

>
> > This is not a good beginning
> >
> > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1642848,00.asp
>
> every time i see another Final and Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem
> (FUSSP, (tm) VJS) get some traction and then fall well short of its goals,
> i've had the same emotion: "well what the h--- did you think was going to
> happen?"
>

I'm not sure the people behind this concept (SPF, RMX, et al) ever
intended it to be the FUSSP, but a lot of the ensuing enthusiasm
built it up to that.

I've *never* viewed SPF as an "antispam" methodology, but considered
it an inevitable utility of the DNS system. Other methods are
evolving to deal with spam, don't confuse them with what SPF is,
which is essentially an authentication/identification framework
that has the ability to mitigate one of the more popularly used
spam obfuscation techniques.

That spammers are publishing SPF records is in no way indicative
of an inherent flaw in SPF's objectives or a failure in its
implementation, in fact, I welcome spammers who publish SPF
data detailing the originating points of their email. If
more "known spam domains" did this, a handy DNSBL could be
constructed out of such data (with a few caveats of course,
it would also potentially open the door to a type of DoS attack).

But at the end of the day, none of this is surprising and none
of it constitutes a "failure" or setback for SPF (quite the
contrary in fact).

-mark

-- 
Mark Jeftovic <markjr at easydns.com>
Co-founder, easyDNS Technologies Inc.
ph. +1-(416)-535-8672 ext 225
fx. +1-(416)-535-0237