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SPF Design Frozen

Posted by timothy on from the are-we-acquainted dept.

Eric S. Smith writes "SPF, previously mentioned here, is a step closer to becoming a real, live RFC. We are encouraged to publish SPF records and thus to hasten the beginning of the end for annoying spam forgeries. SPF describes DNS TXT records that define the hosts authorized to send mail on behalf of users in your domain. Sites can then consult your SPF records and reject spam forged to look like it comes from you." (SPF stands for "Sender Permitted From.")

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Internet does not work that way by bluGill · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your points are both invalid.

    1) Most mail servers already to a return DNS lookup on the IP of who the sender is. (The recived from lines in the headers) DNS takes so little bandwidth compared to normal activity (even compared to the payload of the email it is tiny, not consider all the web browsing, DNS is trivial)

    2)DNS works by asking the root servers who owns a domain. The root servers respond either with the DNS for the domain, or with a no such domain. (Ever hear of Verisign's sitefinder? Verisign runs the root servers, and they started saying anything unowned belonged to them) Essentially no overhead is involved in this.

  2. Adoption Rate by jhunsake · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know I'm going to put the SPF records in as soon as I get a chance, but these statistics aren't terribly optimistic so far:

    http://www.infinitepenguins.net/SPF/register.php

    This system serves to monitor the take-up of SPF. So far, 274 domains with SPF records are known.
    As yet, only a count of registered domains is displayed; more analysis tools will appear once the number of domains increases.

    Of these:
    84 parse cleanly
    0 parse with warnings
    173 parse with errors
    17 are yet to be checked by this system

  3. Summary for mail & network admins by CrystalFalcon · · Score: 3, Informative
    If your MX record is also the IP(s) used for outgoing mail, as in my case, all you have to do is add this line to your DNS:

    [domainname] IN TXT "v=spf1 +mx -all"
    That's it. That's really it, at least for publishing your permissions. So simple I already did it for my domains.