Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Re: SPAM filtering


From: Dan Oachs <doachs () GAC EDU>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 13:59:07 -0500

Our mailservers enforce SPF records and we attempt to educate everyone we
can when we are notified that a message was blocked because the SPF records
say we should.  It is really crazy how many organizations know enough to
setup SPF records but not keep them updated/correct over time.

--Dan

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 11:30 AM Thomas Carter <tcarter () austincollege edu>
wrote:

I wasn’t sure which listserv to post this on, so I thought I’d give this
one a shot.



We recently switched to Barracuda for our spam filtering solution. We
started with the default settings, but have seen a large number of valid
messages getting flagged due to incorrect DKIM and/or SPF settings,
including other .edu domains. I’ve been trying to notify the ones we find,
but I wildly underestimated the number of domains with incorrect SPF
records; they have records, they just aren’t correct (e.g. they use Office
365 for email, but don’t have Microsoft’s SPF info in their record). I
think we’re going to have to back off on filtering based on them. Do you
flag emails based on SPF FAIL/soft FAIL or incorrect DKIM? Do you make sure
it’s correct at your institution?



*Thomas Carter*
Network & Operations Manager / IT

*Austin College*
900 North Grand Avenue
Sherman, TX 75090

Phone: 903-813-2564
www.austincollege.edu



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