Re: "If you believe that the SPF concept is fundamentally flawed, please subscribe at http: //www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/"

John Levine <[email protected]> 26 May 2005 02:15:14 -0000
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.mxcomp
Organization I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>> Contrary to the promotions, SPF will not stop spam.
>
>Who is promoting SPF as an anti-spam solution?  I'd really like to know.

Let's take a look at http://spf.pobox.org.  Hey, look what it says:

  SPF is ushering in a new set of anti-spam systems, where email is
  spam unless proven otherwise.

If history is any guide, some SPF fan will write back in a huff and
say "That doesn't say SPF is an anti-spam solution!  It just says that
SPF is holding a flashlight and will lead the actual anti-spam
solutions to their seats!"

This kind of disingenuous doubletalk has characterized SPF advocacy
since its beginning, and is one of the many reasons that the
mainstream e-mail tech community holds SPF in disdain.  That along
with its egregious design mistakes and its irreparably enormous error
rate, of course.

SPF can help whitelist mail from fixed source senders you already
know.  That's what AOL uses it for, and it's an adequate if overly
complex means to that end.  If the SPF crowd promoted it for that
purpose, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it.  But they
don't and the smoke long ago became unbreathable.

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web