RE: [spf-help] Re: SPF and SenderID

>-----Original Message-----
>From: [email protected]
>[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Douglas Otis
>Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 1:05 PM
>To: Scott Kitterman
>Cc: MARID
>Subject: Re: [spf-help] Re: SPF and SenderID
>
>
>
>
>On Jul 21, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>
>>> I would say there is another option that should be considered.  Not
>>> publishing SPF records.  Many recipients are rejecting '~' and '?'
>>> which
>>> creates an immediate problem for the sender with forwarding issues
>>> that
>>> depend upon this exploited feature.
>>
>> I'm curious what the basis for this statement is.  Do you have
>> statistics?
>
>No statistics.  I am repeating comments I have heard from
>administrators at the meeting.  When perhaps a fraction of a percent
>of non-abusive domains publish these records, saying 'many' would of
>course be like describing the fleas of a flea.  It was not clear if
>this was the result of some type of reputation response due to abuse
>of the '?', which effectively says 'never mind'.  If you feel this to
>be in error then '?'.  It does follow that I had expected and would
>be a natural response when seeing this as means to prevent the
>exploit of a neutral result.
>
>-Doug
>
Some recent statistics posted on spf-discuss showed, IIRC, that Neutral was
not a strong spam sign.  Roughly half of Neutral results were classified Ham
and roughtly half as Spam.  Given that most e-mail being sent today is Spam,
Neutral results actually make a very poor indicator for Spam.

There are some popularly forged domains for which this is not true.  There
was also some recent discussion about strategies to deal with this.  I don't
recall anyone advocating outright rejection of all messages with Neutral
results.  The sensible strategy seemed to set thresholds and start to reject
once a certain number had been received in a certain period.

Softfail was a decent indicator of forged spam, much different than Neutral
as I recall.

Scott Kitterman