Re: Just Another Discussion of Spam

[brian_d_foy]

You can't trust the From address. Spammers have already figured out that they can put anything in there, even real addresses (including mine, this week). I've noticed quite a number of people sending me mail this week complaining about some spam they received. Those messages aren't bouncing.

Responding to spam, even to see if it bounces, just makes the mess worse. Get a good filter, put your friends and family in a white list, and don't worry about the rest.

[tilly]

If you'd used SPF and your friends had paid attention to it, then those spam messages would have bounced.

If you'd used SPF and your friends did not, you'd at least have something constructive to tell them that they should do to cut out some spams.

[brian_d_foy]

It's not about me or my friends. It's about the thousands of people who don't know me. I don't get to decide how that plays, so it doesn't matter.

[tilly]

If you have an SPF record set up, then whatever fraction of them pay attention to SPF would have not been annoyed, and the number of unhappy responses that you got would have been similarly reduced. Given that some big players (eg AOL) have gotten on the SPF bandwagon, the improvement could have been better than you'd think.

Do the math. If you own your own domain, then for less than an hour's effort on your part, thousands of people would have not received spam with your name on it. (Thousands more still would have, but every little bit is an improvement.) And that could be a lot less than an hour. Visit this wizard and 5 minutes later you will have a suggested DNS TXT record implementing SPF. Make that your DNS record and you're done - nobody will be able to forge email in your name to domains that use SPF.

If you think that spammers will continue using your name for spamming, setting up an SPF record strikes me as good neighbourly behaviour.