Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts

Wed Sep 8 19:50:11 UTC 2004

Paul Vixie  <vixie at vix.com> wrote:
[...]
> however, and this is the important part so everybody please pay
> attention, if you can junk something "without hesitation," then
> spammers will stop sending that kind of "something." they make their
> money on clickthroughs, final sales, and referrals, which translates
> to one thing and one thing only: "volume." if the way to keep their
> volume up means "put SPF metadata in for the domains they use" or
> even just "stop forging mail from domains that have SPF metadata"
> then that is exactly what they will do. guaranteed.

Cool, fewer double-bounces implicating me as the source of spam. I'll
take that, ta.

[...]
> i lost that bet during my MAPS years. your mileage may vary, but to
> me, SPF is just a way to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Well, I for one would really really like to thank you for the MAPS
RBL. It may not have been a permanent solution, but it made the
difference while it still worked. If ever you have the misfortune to
find yourself in this arse end of Britain, please do claim a pint ;)

> we won't have decent interpersonal batch digital communications
> again before whitelists; everything we do in the mean time is just a
> way to prove that to the public so they'll be willing to live with
> the high cost of fully distributing trust.

As a poor bastard who seems to be BOFHing for an ISP "fixing" mail, I
can only hope that the future comes up with good ideas in the future
that will help with the tsunami. Given the 400% increase in spam that
we've seen hitting our "spam solution" in the last 3 months, anything
that can make the difference is welcome.

For the long term, I really don't know what to do. Becoming a Knuthian
email hermit is tempting given I'm getting awfully close to the 15
years myself...

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