Gmail jibes with Yahoo to fight spam

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SPF should/will win

SPF should/will win.

Domainkeys is more thorough (allowing end-to-end checks if done on the client, SPF only lets you check the mail server not the sending client) but the complexity of every user signing emails with their own domain key (generated and coordinated with the public key in the server) is too much complexity.
Users won't do it, ISPs won't support the extra email configuration problems so its a non-starter.

SPF on the other hand is trivial to implement, and allows the most important thing - the check that the server you are talking to is the server that sent the email - to stop blacklisted spammers faking the source of the email to get around the spammer blacklist.

It doesn't matter if spammers sign their own domains with SPF, because the blacklist catches them in that case.

There's an obscure case to do with email forwarders, but even thats quite simple to process.

Imagine you receive an email that was forwarded by a forwarder (e.g. bigfoot.com).

Is bigfoot blacklisted? If yes blacklist.
Is bigfoot whitelisted (i.e. is it know to do full SPF checks itself on mail it forwards?). if yes whitelist.
Otherwise treat as unknown content for the normal content filter test, just like the rest of the unknown world.

Posted by: Nigel Johnstone   Posted on: 10/18/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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