Uptick in spam

Tue Oct 27 13:22:31 UTC 2015

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 09:08:00AM -0400, Ian Smith wrote:
> But it's a bit of a stretch to say that [SPF] has zero value.

No, it's not a stretch at all.  It's a statistical reality.  And a single
isolated case does not alter that.

You're welcome to set up your own network of spamtraps and mailboxes,
ingest a sizable corpus of messages, and analyze it.  If you do so,
and if you take care to ensure that the composition of that traffic
is appropriate (that is, not skewed by network, domain, ASN, TLD,
etc.), and you accumulate samples over a period of many years,
you'll find the same thing.

This wasn't always true, incidentally.  In the early days of SPF,
it did have some value, because -- by far -- the most prolific
early adopters of SPF were spammers.

---rsk