nanog mailing list archives
Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts
From: Paul Vixie <vixie () vix com>
Date: 08 Sep 2004 16:59:51 +0000
vgill () vijaygill com (vijay gill) writes:
... That means that if I do get a mail purporting to be from citi from randomgibberish, I can junk it without hesitation.
agreed, that is what it means. 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. there's a bet here. you could bet that by closing off this avenue, SPF will force spammers to use other methods that are more easily detected/filtered, and that if you play this cat&mouse game long enough, it will drive the cost of spam so high (or drive the volume benefit so low) that it'll just die out. 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. 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. -- Paul Vixie
Current thread:
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts, (continued)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Douglas Otis (Sep 07)
- Message not available
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Jakma (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts vijay gill (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Jakma (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts vijay gill (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Stephen J. Wilcox (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Dan Mahoney, System Admin (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Ricardo "Rick" Gonzalez (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Dan Mahoney, System Admin (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Susan Harris (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Vixie (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Douglas Otis (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Peter Corlett (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Stephane Bortzmeyer (Sep 10)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Vixie (Sep 10)
- Message not available
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Jakma (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Paul Vixie (Sep 08)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Dan Mahoney, System Admin (Sep 06)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Niels Bakker (Sep 06)
- Re: Spammers Skirt IP Authentication Attempts Peter Corlett (Sep 06)