Fight Spam With SPF?

It's so easy to forge the "From" address of email, so spammers place any address in the "From" field. Sometimes, they place your address, so you end up getting a lot of these bounced error messages. Aaaargh! Perhaps SPF can help?

SPF is a system that allows the delivery of email if there is proof that the address which appears in the "From" field really sent that email out.

I got excited when I read about what the Sender Policy Framework does.

After a few minutes, though, I couldn't shake that it's too good to be true feeling, so I did a search on SPF and found...

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's SPF is harmful. Adopt it.

A person may own an entire domain and wish to submit mail, using mailbox names in his/her own domain as the envelope senders, directly from a system with a dynamically-assigned IP address (such as, for example, a portable system that connects via multiple ISPs).

Yikes. That may be a problem for mobile people who would like to send email no matter where they are. Thankfully, Jonathan presents an alternative in his article.

I'm beginning to move away from email, as far as this web site is concerned. Perhaps I'll just post a kind of comment board where people can post their questions. When that day comes, I'll probably get rid of the comment box below, because it tends to just fill up my Inbox with messages that I end up simply deleting.

Anyway, we'll see.

What about you? Is there still hope for email?
[ First posted on 03/16/2005 by Manuel Viloria ]