AT&T SMTP Admin contact?

Brad Laue brad at brad-x.com
Tue Nov 24 21:38:33 UTC 2009


On 2009-11-24, at 1:27 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> 
> 
> Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:50:54 EST, Brad Laue said:
>>> maintained. I'm unclear as to why mail administrators don't work more 
>>> proactively with things like SenderID and SPF, as these seem to be far 
>>> more maintainable in the long-run than an ever-growing list of IP 
>>> address ranges.
>> 
>> There's a difference between maintainable and usable.  Yes, letting the remote
>> end maintain their SenderID and SPF is more scalable, and both do at least a
>> plausible job of answering "Is this mail claiming to be from foobar.com really
>> from foobar.com?". However, there's like 140M+ .coms now, and  neither of them
>> actually tell you what you really want to know, which is "do I want e-mail from
>> foobar.com or not?".  Especially when the spammer is often in cahoots with the
>> DNS admins...
> 
> identify framework with trust anchors and reputation management are not
> things that spf or pra actually solve. spammers can publish spf and
> senderid records and in fact arguably have more incentive to do so if it
> can be demonstrated that your mail is more likely to be accepted on the
> basis of their existence.

True, but wouldn't a blacklist of SPF records for known spam issuing domains be a more maintainable list than an IP block whitelist?

(I'm no doubt missing something very obvious with this question)

Brad




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