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MS and Sendmail work together on Spam Solution
fudgefactor7 writes "Powerhouse software vendor Microsoft and the venerable Sendmail, have formed an alliance to launch a sender authentication plug-in which is hoped will combat email fraud and spam. The plug-in lets organisations verify a message's source before accepting it by automatically checking to see if an email came from where it claims it did. Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?" Update: 02/26 08:01 GMT by S : Though Microsoft and Sendmail are both working on solutions, there's no official alliance in place between the companies.
"Powerhouse software vendor Microsoft and the venerable Sendmail, have formed an alliance to launch a sender authentication plug-in which is hoped will combat email fraud and spam. The plug-in lets organisations verify a message's source before accepting it by automatically checking to see if an email came from where it claims it did. Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?"
:-)
Wow......this really sounds like it was written by a marketing director. A Slashdotter could have just as easily interpreted this as "The 800 lb gorilla of the software industry, Microsoft has coerced the long suffering Sendmail to provide Microsoft with a software patch that fixes security holes inherent in Microsoft products that allow for email fraud and spam to run rampant. Another side benefit is that Microsoft can exert their market dominance to further entrench the Microsoft monopoly by refusing email not conforming to Microsoft "standards".
Laugh, it's intended to be funny.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Will it be in the free version of sendmail too or only in the commercial buy-version?
They were looking for something with more vulnerabilities than Windows! Seriously, who uses sendmail? I thought we all started using Qmail or other alternatives?
Just adding a tag or a plugin wouldn't seem like it would help all that much...Email is such an open format that anything you add, can be copied and added by spammers too.
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I posted an idea similar to this on slashdot here, which would essentially involve sendmail digitally signing messages that it sends and then having receiving mail servers verify it. I think most of the people who read the idea misinterpreted it as forcing us to get digital certs through verisign, which was NOT what I was implying.
See, now this is a much better idea than "email postage" and "computationally expensive" sending of email. This way, the accountability falls down to individual email addresses, and domains for sending UCE.
It's FAR easier to track emails and their likelyhood of sending spam than the actual messages themselves (after all, buyviagra@biggerpenis.org is most likely sending you spam).
This, combined with a spam filter could do the trick.
Congratulations Microsoft for actually partnering with somebody who matters is this whole affair. I'm hoping the other companies like Yahoo and AOL follow suit with this strategy, and a solution becomes standardized.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Microsoft is one of several companies who are also working to combat spam with a "caller ID" system. Yahoo's DomainKeys is another one.
MS is a footnote. Aside from headline, the article mentions nothing about an 'alliance' or even Sendmail and MS working together.
Isn't this one of the signs of the apocolypse?
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
So, is qmail getting in on this solution????
Evolution or ID?
Yahoo & sendmail cooperating
First your cf syntax, now working with Microsoft?! What did we ever do to you?! Truly, a sysadmin's worst enemy.
Game... blouses.
This isn't going to fix it.
A crap load of junk mail comes from insecure personal computers that were hijacked. If these computers send their junk mail, and this system tracks them, it will send the "A-OK" because the mail came from where it said it did.
This will help, no doubt. But fix the problem? No.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
but it will need widespread acceptance to really work
And therein lies the problem. No vendor, no matter how well placed, should just run off and try to implement a solution. Why? Because odds are good it will not take off. Everyone involved needs to agree on a solution THEN implement it.
Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?
Dunno... but it could be the beginning of the end of sendmail. Not that it would be a bad thing...
There's much better software out there.
Microsoft working with a Free Software group to produce a standard that will be freely available?
Sounds more like the end of the world than the end of spam to me!
Beep beep.
nowhere in the fscking article does it say anything about MS and Sendmail working together.
It tells of Sendmail launching a plugin for sendmail, and then :
"Microsoft is one of several companies who are also working to combat spam with a "caller ID" system."
Does anyone RTFA anymore? Am I alone in this? Is god really a abnormally large crustacean living on the moons of Jupiter?
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
MS put a signature in all emails from outlook, and sendmail blocks everything with that signature?
Stop me if I am wrong, but aren't Sendmail and Microsoft two of the biggest security problems on the Internet today? (Microsoft, of course, is a lot more dangerous, but still).
;^)
I believe it was a former sysadmin at a previous job who told me (speaking of email, of course): "Never install Sendmail. Period". Thats sums it up pretty nicely.
And I don't: Postfix is faster, more secure and easier to configure than Sendmail ever was. Qmail is also quite good.
(Microsoft? Who needs Microsoft??)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
"Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of sendmail?"
Phil
I doubt this will end spam.. however it will put an end to the collaterol damage caused to other people's inboxes when some other jerk spoofs their domain names. (yes I'm mad.. I have 1000 bounces from the other week when someone sent online pharmacy ads while pretending to be ME)
It will also put an end to using a free email account to recieve spam replies.
So it's not a cure but it will make the game more expensive for the spammers.
Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?"
Yes, just like computers have made the era of office paper end (I enjoy my paperless office, do you?), and how Bill Clinton in 1995 ended the era of big government.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Will my email server I run perfectly responsibly just for my family be able to function without paying Microsoft for the plugin? Afterall, it is not rocket science to code your own SMTP server with Visual Basic.... This will work for the controllable sources, but what about foreign servers and the rest of the World?
With the combined stellar security records of MS and sendmail, guess how secure the new software would be.
That screams safe and secure to me. Then, maybe we could set it up with BIND.. and the computer would be safe..
until you plug it in..
(Flamebait to induce conversation.. calm down)
and I've just written an email tracking program . . .
It says nothing about Sendmail and MSFT working together. Only that they're working on their own solutions to the same problem.
While it's nice to see this type of work being done, the headline is misleading.
wbs.
Huh?
I vote that MS is going to try to embrace, extend, and exterminate anything it can rather than be of help.
This Inforworld Article is much better then the one posted and mentions how this new Microsoft Idea is very similar to the existing SPF, except that with Microsft's version, the whole message is sent and downloaded before it's rejected.
Spammers used to buy a T1's worth of phone lines and then dial in to several different ISP's all at once and use THEIR mail server to send spam. With the advent of easily hacked broadband connections, this isn't required anymore. I can see it popping back up pretty quickly. While the idea is OK, spammers are adaptable. The ONLY way to make spammers stop, is to make them feel pain and this solution doesn't provide nearly enough pain.
For instance, I ws joe jobbed, I recieved about 2300 bounced messages advertising various web sites. For every bounced message I forwarded a 900k graphic that said "Do not use my return address in your spam campaign, it is illegal". Since I recieved another bounced spam before I had finished responding to these kind people, I decided perhaps another avenue of communication was approriate. I posted an order on each of the three websites I found advertised 2300 times (PERL w/LWP). Since I was unable to get a response via e-mail, I figured that I would get a response via an order form. I posted 2300 times(one for each boucne) with my contact information and a request to not use my e-mail in the shipping information box.
What happened?
1. one of the mail servers stopped responding all together. It didn't come back up for more than a week (qmail queue default lifetime anyone?)
2. During the post to these web sites (ALL on hacked machines running open proxy servers) the web site went down and stopped responding. I guess the concurrency of 2300 was a bad idea.
It appears that my e-mail address is no longer being used, although their websites finally recovered about 8 hours later. These web sites no longer accept orders from my IP address. No imagine if only 1/2 the people that recieved a spam did what I did? Think of the number of bogus orders that have to be sorted to simply get to a legitimate one? Think of the amount of traffic going INTO comcast and RR to these hacked machines (waving flag over here, over here LOOK LOOK security@rr.com!). Of course this would take time, and we alreayd have precious little of this. If enough people took the time, we would also have precious little spam. The cost would be too high.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Not in any dictionary I've seen.
venerable ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vnr--bl)
adj.
1. Commanding respect by virtue of age, dignity, character, or position.
2. Worthy of reverence, especially by religious or historical association: venerable relics.
3. Venerable Abbr. Ven. or V.
1. Roman Catholic Church. Used as a form of address for a person who has reached the first stage of canonization.
2. Used as a form of address for an archdeacon in the Anglican Church or the Episcopal Church.
There's something at least very similar to that already available as a milter. milter-sender does an email callback to the mx of the domain the email claims to be from and verifies that the address exists. Unlike some of the other solutions available, it doesn't expect the sender to send another mail to verify he's a genuine sender, but accepts the email if the mx doesn't fail to the "RCPT TO" command (exceptions requiring a "full callback" can be configured for mxs that only find out they don't know the recipient after the DATA command has been sent).
Seriously now.. the two most insecure mail server providers are teaming up? I smell a debacle in the making. End of spam as we know it? Unlikely factor: 9.5
;)
And I'm sure DJB will be right on top of this.
As a public service I am providing my sendmail.cf file as a configuration example.
HReceived: $?sfrom $s $.$?_($?s$|from $.$_)
HDate:@@_$_$?sfrom^*$%#%!*(()^&^&*#$##
$%@$#%&&_%#__&^#$%_#$%%___*(__Y_JY_*_*(_#$%#_
#@$@@#sonofa@#$%@@#@#$#
I know it just looks like line noise but this is a working config!
seems to be that identd would do a sufficient job at reducing spam. rather than overcomplicating things, why dont they just start using the underused identd again??
Incidentally, a better solution might use Identity Based Encryption. Still has many of the same problems, but it's a tiny bit more elegant.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Microsoft is pushing a solution called "Caller ID", which involves putting (wince) XML documents into the DNS telling you how to check the (argh) From: header.
A lot of other people are pushing a solution called SPF, which involves putting text "code snippets" into the DNS telling you how to check the MAIL FROM: envelope return address.
This topic will be discussed at the IETF next week in Seoul, Korea. Hot topic!
http://www.sendmail.com/sender_auth.shtml
The plug-in lets organisations verify a message's source before accepting it by automatically checking to see if an email came from where it claims it did.
Doesn't this just sound like a great way to create a DoS style attack?
I: Flood many servers with email supposedly from server X
II: All servers attempt to contact server X
III: Server X crashes/is overwhelmed with requests, stops responding
IV: Some of the orginal servers might get hung trying to clear email from Server X, now no longer responding...
I admit that IV seems avoidable, but I-III don't seem like a big strech based off of prior MS security exploits...
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
What is this ...article you speak of?
Now my little server can do advanced reverse lookups on the over 90,000 spam messages it handles per month.
I'm thinking not...
How about making all spam a crime and holding the companies who finance it liable. Then giving consumers the power to sue for damages.
I'm not an ISP, under CAN-SPAM I can't do ANYTHING about the over NINETY THOUSAND spam messages sent to my server per month.
Needless to say, my poor little PII-400 linux box gags and chokes during spuratic 'floods' of spam through each day.
I must say, though, any efforts to thwart spam are good in my opinion. However, the problem will _never_ be solved until the companies PAYING for spam are held financially and/or criminally liable for their actions.
After all, if you PAY someone to commit murder for you -- does that make you any less guilty?
No.
MS and Sendmail are probably responsible for 90% of the spam out there, with default open relay policies, cryptic documentation, and (in MS' case) a corporate culture and influence which means that only chimps and other simian life forms become Exchange admins. Flame all you want, this is from direct experience.
At an old job as a firewall engineer, I had to tell the Exchange Admin for a major medical insurance provider HOW to set up our AV server as their relay. I found it on Google faster than she could fumble through her documentation. At another site, I had to battle an NT/Exchange admin who, after moving the Exchange server to an internal network, wondered why he no longer could receive mail.
MS and Sendmail owe everyone on the Internet countless hours of lost time due to idiotic softawre config problems, its about time that they came up with a solution.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I hope the IETF is smart enough to not support any solution that would make it impossible for me as a regular joe-home user to run my own mailserver. If some other server wants to talk to mine and ask "did you send me this?" that's great, but if some other server decides to /dev/null a message from me because my IP doesn't backward resolve to the domain claimed when sending, then that's bad.
I'm actually a bit scared that this 'anti-spam' crusade will end with an even bigger wall between "users who should pay and consume" and "legitimate service providers".
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Sendmail is one of the vendors working on Sender Permited From or Sender Policy Framwork is it not? spf.pobox.com I have no clue, nor did the article, on what Microsoft might be doing.
SPF is basicly a reverse DNS lookup on SMTP servers if I understand it correctly. Basicly under the plan to send mail you have to have a registered SMTP server in DNS so that your mail can be traced back to the sending SMTP server. No SPF records then your mail is most likely spam and can be discarded at the client or even at the POP server. Heck I suppose even SMTP servers could refuse to forward such mail. Will not eliminate all spam but it would halt the span-in-can email virus like SoBig that makes every Winblows box into instant spam machine. It would also stop spoofed email that causes so much headache.
Very needed plan IMHO.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
And therein lies the problem. No vendor, no matter how well placed, should just run off and try to implement a solution. Why? Because odds are good it will not take off. Everyone involved needs to agree on a solution THEN implement it.
As with any change to infrastructure, the conversion is likely best done in a phased approach.
Step 1: Impliment authentication, but don't block messages from unauthenticated servers.
Step 2: Adjust existing SPAM filters to weigh mail from unauthenticated servers as having x % (where x is initially some relatively low number) greater liklihood of being SPAM than messages from authenticated servers.
Step 3: Increase x gradually over time. At the end of some period (say, one year), x appraoches 90%, effectively blocking most mail not on whitelists from unauthenticated servers. Leave x at this high value for some time (say another year)
Step 4: stop accepting mail from anauthenticated servers completely.
End of SPAM? Probably not (as SPAM mailers can authenticate themselves, and Microsoft WORMS and Viruses can hijack legitimate mail servers which authenticate themselves and send SPAM anyway) but it is a start.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If so, this will bother me to no end. I currently have two main email addresses, one using Cluemail and one using MyRealBox. I check both of these addresses using IMAP with MacOS X's Mail.app. However, since MyRealBox is an experimental server and is not always up and since the free accounts on ClueMail don't have SMPT access, I am using my own machine running QMail to send my emails. Obviously my IP and whatever domain gets assigned to it from So-Net (yay Fiber Optic connection to the apartment!!) do NOT match either of my mail addresses.
So, will something like this spam solution break my set-up?
Disclaimer: I am somewhat clueless about all of this. I only know enough to have been able to set my machine up securely so it is not nor can/will not be a source of spam. So, I appreciate any information. Cheers. :)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
A large portion of the spam I receive doesn't have my address in the To: field. Why doesn't mailer software look for this kind of mail? Am I missing something?
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
I still have my system up, but I am denied at places becuase I am on Comcast Cable. Yet, I have never had an open relay, nor been cracked. I find it obnoxious that I have issues sending simply due to location rather than an inability to have a secured system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Email doesn't need more bandaids and half-@ssed fixes, we need a ground-up rewrite that replaces SMTP.
It would be a very easy thing for the standards bodies to hash out the best SMTP replacement in 90 days (we've been talking about all of the changes for years, just decide already and take action!) and then announce to the world: "On January 1st, 2005 all SMTP email will be phased out in a 90 day transition period. It will be replaced by [acronym], which will prevent spam in it's various forms".
Anything short of this is a hack that will enjoy only very limited success and only prolong the inevitable.
There is far more wrong with email than just spam, and the protocol is showing it's age. A lot has happened in 20 years (not to mention the last 5 in particular), and it is time for complete replacement (that doesn't involve me paying money for email stamps...).
I know I'm blowing my karma points on this one, but I believe it's justified and realistic.
No business partnership or alliance of any signficance has existed with Microsoft that resulted in a mutually beneficial conclusion. To put it another way, it's like trying to make a deal with the devil.
I don't expect that sendmail will be summarily destroyed as such. But I ernestly and honestly believe that the final outcome of this venture will only result in Micorosoft obtaining an absolute choke hold on email.
To expect anything less is niave and ignorant. There is no past performance which disputes this claim. Even considering legal judgements, Microsoft will not hesitate to make "all your email belong to us".
I apologize if I come off sounding like one of the slashdot anto-microsoft zealots, or some conspiracy theorist. But think it through.
Microsoft develops a means by which all email must be reverse authenticated as to the sender. Believe me, they will patent it and everything that looks like it before the night is over. This sounds great, but then all they do is just modify the email servers to require that this proprietary reverse authentication take place or you can't send any email.
The fact that they are working with sendmail, the company and not the OS project, allows them to license this technology to a Unix platform. This allows them a foothold onto the majority of email servers, which are Unix based, and to establish the means by which they have complete ownership of all email transactions. And it will be a matter of time before sendmail.com has to turn over their assets to pay the licensing fees, but then maybe Microsoft doesn't want them able to pay the fees.
Yeah, Spam sucks. But get a clue! Spam filters account for 99+% of all the spam out there. I would rather have my 1 spam a week out of 600 then to have Microsoft telling me I have to pay royalties to send email. There is nothing cool or encouraging about this.
And the real problem here isn't the spam, or the cost of sending spam, they haven't done anything to reduce either one of these. The problem is the adolescent pimple-butts who really think that herbal viagra will give them a 36" schlong that lasts all month long. Do you really want that? It's hard to pee standing on your head!
Anybody with over 10,000,000,000 cash is considered a powerhouse in my book. And I think any email program that exsisted before 1995 is venerable...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
In fact, if you search the /. archives, you'll find a somewhat recent article.
For the average /. reader who can't be bothered to RTFA, the short of it is that works like a reverse MX record. Only hosts listed in your SPF (Sender Policy Framework) rules (published in DNS) are considered allowed senders of email from your domain. Recieving MTAs can then make an informed decision on whether to accept mail that has an envelope sender from you domain, based on whether the sending host is listed as permitted. This means that for any domain that is publishing SPF rules, spoofing the sender address while using an open relay/M$ zombie box becomes impossible, as long as the receiving MTA checks SPF.
It won't put an end to spam, but when enough domains have implemented both publishing SPF rules as well as checking them for inbound mail, it will cause severe headaches to the spammers, and cut down their arena significantly. Best of all, if there ever are any false positives that are rejected, it's due to the originating site policies, not the receiver's or middleman (as the case easily is with distributed blacklists)!
If it's sendmail they'll probably push to verify against passport.com.
Microsoft does have the power and the ubiquity to push a standard through but we also know about embrace and extend.
Instead of everyone working on seperate anti-spam standards (yahoo - domainkeys, AOL testing SPF) it would be better if the largest email providers used industry standards bodies (IETF, ECMA) to push through a common verification standard.
- cnb
ever seen in email from your sendmail MTA where in the header it say "FORGED". usually on spam email. You know you can block on that in sendmail without any add-ons... The problem is that the majority of the internet servers must then go out and update their DNS records for MX and reverse, for this to actually work.
PS: I actually turned this on one time to get rid of spam, blocking a whole bunch of legit email in the process. Ooops. hello internet just enforce the tools that you already posses.. nuff said.
--jboss
this is great first step, but it wont stop spam. it will only prevent spammers from spoofing their email addresses, etc. what good is that when the spammer lives in a country that has no laws against spam?
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
I guess I will have to put up my OWN MTA (against the TOS for my ISP now) - SSH into it and deliver mail from that. What a pain to get around spam filters. This might make it slightly harder for the spammers - but it will make it infinitely harder for people like me that just want e-mail to work. Oh for the days when it was considered rude to close off access to your MTA. (Damned spammers ruined everything)
Had fun last weekend trying to e-mail my room mates work account. I wanted him to see an URL that he would be intereted in
Subject: Check this out
Response - This subject is commonly used in Virus e-mail, bounced back to me.
Three attempts later and I finally found a subject that I could use to send him e-mail. What a pain.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
The core "problem" with the internet is that just about anyone can create a domain and the associated zone files and have them served as authoritative. There are at lesat two free DNS services out there that will host whatever zone data you wish to throw at them. Personally I don't consider this a problem, but a very nice feature.
When you can register domains in bulk for $5, perhaps less, and can host the DNS for free or just a few dollars a year, how exactly is any DNS based verification system going to operate to limit spam? Al the spammers have to do is fudge up the zone file so that any verification system will succeede because the spamming server is "legit". The server may very well be anonyous or hacked or have 20 IP addresses.
I still say the single best solution to spam is for ISPs to start a policy of disposable email addresses. This is a relatively simple matter to impliment with Sendmail and a few CGI scripts, or even via email messages.
An end user is given lets say 8 email addresses. These addresses are never to be given out to anyone for email purposes, they are simply for sorting incoming mail among several family/household members.
Each account can have up to 50 aliases at any time. Aliases are created on the fly by the end user, and can be set to expire at some future date, or be removed manually.
When you go to sign up for a discussion forum you create an alias for just that forum, ex: gjslashdot@ispdomain.com. If you start getting spam on that address, you can simply delete it and create another one, there's no attachment to the address outside that forum.
I've been using this system myself for about a year and have gone from 500+ spams a month to 3-5 a month. Again... as soon as I get spam at an address, I delete it and create a new one if necessary.
What's causing the spam problem is human ignorance. Layering technological complexity on top of the existing system will not eliminate the underlying ignorance. My solution does that.
As far as corporations go.... get your email addresses off of your business cards, and stop using employee names as the basis for email addresses. If someone has access to an email client, they probably have access to a web client. Out-side emailers should use a web form to send email to employees unless there is an existing relationship.
Once there is a relationship, siret email can be used.
Email addresses on business cards... business cards handed out like candy on haloween... no wonder you get inundated with spam.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
There are currently 3 solutions competing on the internet. Only one actually works right now as we speak.
(1) Caller ID is Microsoft's big proposal. Domain owners put XML in the TXT records in their domain. Receiving email systems can determine if a message is valid only after seeing all of the headers.
(2) SPF (http://spf.pobox.com/) is already implemented and is already blocking joe-jobs and phishing schemes. It relies only on the envelope FROM and the owners of the domain publishing a short TXT record. Currently, aol.com and many more domains (around 6,000?) publish SPF records. Implementations for filtering based on SPF exist in perl, python, C, and for Exim, postfix, qmail and sendmail.
There is a small problem in forwarding email properly, but that is being resolved with SRS (same website).
(3) DomainKeys (Yahoo!'s solution) is still being researched and is looking more and more like S/MIME or PGP but for an entire domain. The domain owners would publish the public key via DNS (probably a TXT record as well) and receving mail servers can verify that the message is indeed from said domain. There are some severe limitations: If someone gets your domain private key, you are screwed. It's also subject to a replay attack. The attacker would send a valid email to themselves through a server using domain keys, and then replay that message to the rest of the internet.
Both SPF and Caller ID can't work around DNS poisoning or IP spoofing. But they both limit the number of machines that are allowed to send email for a domain.
It is important that if you own a domain, that you publish SPF records - even if it is only "v=spf1 !all" or "I don't send any email for this domain". SPF, if it is going to be adopted, is going to be adopted at an exponential rate.
Caller ID is mostly Microsoft's response to the rapid success of SPF. They want to own the solution to spam, and they want to take credit for cleaning up your email box, even though their idea is really other people's ideas + XML. The protocol is heavy, burdensome, and subject to the whims of the XML interpreters out there right now. Plus, it is a huge proposal that is detailed and complicated, ripe for incompatibilities that could force users of Sendmail, Exim, Postfix, or Qmail to "upgrade" to Exchange.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Maybe. It depends on the implementation.
As an email originator, you have an envelope, a From: address, and a ReplyTo: address. I'm pretty sure that they're not going to filter on the ReplyTo: address, but From: and envelope are a different matter.
I have an email vanity domain, and they forward it all to my ISP's POP box. One of the things I like about Exim is that it can easily and *thoroughly* rewrite addresses, including the envelope. My outgoing email goes through my ISP's relay, but in every way except headers, it looks like it came from my vanity domain.
It looks to me as if this scheme will break my current vanity domain usage. Further, it looks to me as if it will require care to make *any* vanity domain usage work.
BTW, the other reason for a vanity domain is to keep your email address constant even when changing ISPs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The plug-in lets organisations verify a message's source before accepting it by automatically checking to see if an email came from where it claims it did.
How is this to be attained? Checking DNS won't work - one is bound to get false positives when a DNS query fails on an existing domain.
Some mail servers are even configured so you can't lookup to see if a user exists. So you'd have to disable the lookup feature which most email servers already offer to check sending addresses so the server is meant to become a blackhole for spam...
Domain keys - pfft. It's as likely as any other technology - EVERYONE has to unilaterally implement it for it to work. Nevermind that it would be a matter of time before domain keys are spoofed.
Want to be effective for a period against spam? Then do what's needed on an already ailing system - re-write it from the ground up. There's numerous other features that are missing from email like UTF-8 support because English is the only language supported by email for usernames, passwords. In accompaniment, DNS needs UTF-8 support...
The sad truth is that this will never happen unless something catastrophic happened to the existing infrastructure.
I already use a challenge/response system to filter my spam, and it works amazingly well. This is similar to the proposed MS/Sendmail "plug-in" in that it tries to verify that the sender is real and actually sent the email in question.
The one big problem neither system solves is spam from sources that are not forged, and actually have a valid return address. Nigerian spam gets through in either case, because an actual human is there. And sites that have a response-bot get through my challenge system (for the moment). These are the extreme rarity, of course, but if everyone used such a system then the spammers would just start using real verifiable return addresses all the time. It's easy to generate a new domain name every day (some already do) and get new IP blocks on a regular basis, so there's no easy way to automatically block email.
Even worse, spammers could still send out the email using zombies while putting valid return addresses in the spam so that it can be verified. They only need to hack their sendmail plugin to auto-verify any email with their return address on it and they can still use zombies all they like to send spam.
I think it's safe to say, as long as there's email, there will be spam.
Umm... You mean exactly like most linux installs, right?
The whole "sendmail isn't safe" mantra is based on very old versions. Not surprisingly, all from when it was being [primarily] supported and developed by people with 'day' jobs.
Since when has the difficulty to manually configure *nix software been something one should open there mouth about onSMTP is a simple concept, but somehow sendmail found a way to make it your worst nightmare. The gotcha's on the configuration alone is enough to break someone.
Snicker. Well yes the S stands for simple... Are you just talking about RFC 821??? What about 822, 876, 947, 1869, 1870, 1891, 1893, 1985, 2033, 2034, 2045, 2046, 2047, 2048, 2049, 2197, 2487, 2554, 2821, 2822? [BTW I'm sure I missed some, and yes some surpercede others]. You don't often use SMTP anymore, rather ESMTP with extensions.
FWIW it's really really easy to make sendmail a non-open relay. I even think RH configures it that way from the start.
Use whatever MTA works for you, but don't confuse your relative [or subjective] case with the absolute 'sendmail bad, MyMTA good.' As for Sendmail- they deserves some credit, if for nothing else, that it actually pays money to support one of the more important and underappreciated open source packages. Everything post 8.8 or is it 8.9.3 was heavily contributed to by them.
I'll bet a penny you use pico...
--Someone with yellow car; plate Y EHLO
This is just leading to a monoply and corporate control of the Internet. As much as I'd like to see a solution like this, as I believe it will work, we need to be sure that anyone can still participate
Our LUG recently had a disucssion on x.509 certs and how it could be used to verify a mail server. If a mail server starts to send spam, the cert is revoked and can no longer send mail. This is more drastic, and leads to the same corporate control however.
-- DuckWing
Certainly not. I do however predict it will be the beginning of the end of email. This is a perfect way to segment the email systems from one another; those that utilize this plugin and those that are discriminated against for not using this plugin. I for one will not use something that isn't a damned standard. You don't have to be an evil genius to recognize the evils of introducing non-standard requirements into such a critical system. It's just plain nuts.
Powerhouse software vendor Microsoft and the venerable Sendmail, have formed an alliance
You misspelled vulnerable... HTH, HANDOh, I thought this was a reference to the ident protocol, already supported by sendmail, which would solve the problem in exactly the same way if firewall admins were willing to open up their AUTH ports and run identd daemons.
Nah, this is an elaboration of the same thing but on the email port instead.
Slap a few new buzzwords on it as it goes through the door, of course... PKI! WMD! Cryptographic keys! 40% more trunk room! Compassionately Conservative (Less liberal than the leading brand)! Microsoft Windows Compatible!
Now it's sure to sell. Won't stink up the room as bad as old dead identd I hope.
This is a horible idea - for those of us that bounce through different MTAs during our life based on where we are (work/home/travelling/etc.) to send mail out, but still wanting all of our mail to come to our trusty inbox.
Shoot, man! That's what SMTP Auth is for. Most of my "roaming" users use it. Those that don't, use webmail. Talk to your mail provider. They probably have a solution similar to this (it's been around for a while now).
Subject: Check this out
Response - This subject is commonly used in Virus e-mail, bounced back to me.
Now *that* is screwed up. Just like people of set up their mail servers to bounce any email containing the word "viagra", the potential for false positives is too high.
No sig
Usually when MS forms an alliance with someone for any reason they want to put them out of business somehow, but not sure if that would happen in this case. Isn't sendmail GPL or BSD licensed?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
If Microsoft and Sendmail are working together on Spam Solution, then I guess we can all rest assured that whatever they build, it won't have any buffer overflow problems. I, for one, am looking forward to use 1.0.0 version on my production systems.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I wonder if this will have a positive impact on mass-mailing virii that rely so heavily on spoofed "From" fields, or if this will just further slow down our mail servers as it filters through it. I guess it's a matter of which is the lesser of the performance evils: the antivirus engine, or this new fancy schmancy sender verification idea.
will the plug-in be available for non-Microsoft systems? If not, then this will just cause a shift in the host OS of choice for spamming, thus allowing Microsoft to blame spam on "those commie hippy pinko open-source zealots."
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If the ISP's mailservers would also check for mail in outgoing mail, and automatically shut off anyone that exeeds a certain treshold. They would have to block all outgoing traffic on port 25 as well.
Certifying the mailservers will make the certified mailservers a more valuable resource (now every virus or spammer brings along it's own smtp engine). In turn this will make the keys to use these resources more valuable. So instead of bringing along a smtp engine, spammers will have to steal the keys to the mailserver (usually located in the outlook configuration).
Blocking outgoing port 25 at the first router will have the same effect, but very few providers have doen that as far as I know. Maybe you are right in that respect that it will not work after all.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I use open relays constructively. My ISP doesn't give me an SMTP server, I have to deliver all of my own mail via sendmail. This means that messages from my email account aren't directly from my domain's server. It irritates me when my email is seen as spam by unintelligent spam filters because this is a problem that I have had to deal with for years and I'm sure others are in a similar situation. I personally thing that a scheme like PGP is the only way to rid the world of spam and to authenticate all email messages.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Both are described in positive terms. Where's the bias, except in your head?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Face it: by any rational standard, sendmail sucks. /etc/sendmail.cf is so obfuscated that makes the Windows registry look simple by comparison. It's track record for security is as bad as anything coming out of Redmond, and has a similar track record for releasing patches which break more than they fix. Fortunately for mail administrators who aren't masochists, there is Postfix. Now if only some of the major Linux distros *cough*redhat*cough* would use postfix as their default MTA, life would be better.
The parent poster is also correct in that Microsoft has made important contributions to ITEF and other open standards boards. They do occasionally manage to do the right thing, even if it's because the engineers managed to sneak it out the back door when the marketroids weren't watching.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
A: Things would have worked out roughly the same, but with another company or set of companies up top. With any kind of luck that company would have had some better ethics and a less paranoid world-view.
B: Even if you accept the "microsoft invented everything good" notion, take a look at their bank account and try to say that with a straight face.
C: Hardware pricing falling while getting faster is where the real ubiquity comes from.
Pull your nose out of Bill's behind and think for yourself.
emt 377 emt 4
While it admittedly takes significantly more real legwork, I'd imagine that much of the protection provided by authenticated email could be bypassed by riding on other people's unsecured wifi networks and sending mail via their trusting ISP's mail server. I'm might just start wardriving in my branded SPAM-van.
"It looks like you are editing your sendmail.mc file. Would you like to add:
..."
1. define('confTRY_NULL_MX_LIST',true)
2. define('UUCP_MAILER_MAX','2000000')
3. define('confAUTH_MECHANISMS', 'EXTERNAL GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN')
4. FEATURE(`relay_based_on_MX')
5.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
reverse DNS is problematic for exactly the reason you allude to, namely that ISPs rather than domain owners are in technical control, which puts small users (I is one!) at a big disadvantage. For these reasons rather than rDNS Caller ID instead uses a new forward query to the domain purportedly responsible for a message. If you can admin your incoming MX records, then you can admin your Caller ID outgoing info: the control is in the same place. You can find gruesome details from http://www.microsoft.com/spam.
Thanks for the link -- much appreciated and read.
.doc format. Well, here's my take. The MS solution doesn't provide, as the top sender assumed, a real PKI-based solution, which is what really excited me. That would ultimately solve a lot of problems in a much better fashion.
Sigh. Trust Microsoft to release their techncial information in
The Microsoft solution is not actually very different than SPF. It aims at doing pretty much the same thing -- identifying outbound mail servers for a domain in DNS, and disallowing mail from any mail servers that are not listed in DNS. I *still* feel that this approach is a hack and is going to have undesireable long-term effects.
There are some things to be said for the Microsoft approach, though. It seems to be basically a "better SPF". They considered a number of implementation issues that I was upset over in SPF. They talk about DNS caching and security implications of DNS as a transport mechanism. They address server migration, and provide an attempt at dealing with multiple apparent identities -- one that I feel isn't really sufficient, but which Microsft, being Microsoft, might manage to pull off through control of Outlook.
Having read the SPF proposal and the Microsoft proposal, I do think that the Microsoft work is a lot more mature and builds on SPF, and is a better overall solution.
If one of the two must be implemented in the short term, I would prefer Microsoft's work.
I still think that Microsoft's Caller ID is still vulnerable to a number of SPF holes (such as throwaway domains). I am more than a little irritated, since Microsoft is really the only single player capable of promoting a PKI scheme (given that they control a major mail server and the major mail client). Furthermore, migrating to a PKI-based system would provide reasons to upgrade to new versions of Microsoft software -- pushing PKI makes excellent business sense for Microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft needed a solution *now*, given that they were facing SPF deployment, and wanted to fix some of SPF's problems rather than gambling on a full retrofit of the email system.
May we never see th