in reply to Re: Just Another Discussion of Spam
in thread Just Another Discussion of Spam

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.

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Re^3: Just Another Discussion of Spam
by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Mar 20, 2005 at 07:34 UTC

    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.

    --
    brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>
      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.

        I've done the math. I don't own my own domain, and a lot of people who don't use SPF would still get it. Indeed, PANIX appears to use SPF, and I still got the email from other people.

        You can stop berating me now: I wasn't complaining before: I was just noting that spammers forge From: addresses. They'll still be able to forge it, and I'll still get the email, and it doesn't really bother me that much.

        --
        brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>