Could We Eliminate Spam With DMARC? (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "The spam problem would not only be significantly reduced, it'd probably almost go away," argues Paul Edmunds, the head of technology from the cybercrimes division of the U.K.'s National Crime Agency -- suggesting that more businesses should be using DMARC, an email validation system that uses both the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). "Edmunds argued, if DMARC was rolled out everywhere in order to verify if messages come from legitimate domains, it would be a major blow to spam distributors and take a big step towards protecting organizations from this type of crime..." reports ZDNet. "However, according to a recent survey by the Global Cyber Alliance, DMARC isn't widely used and only 15% of cybersecurity vendors themselves are using DMARC to prevent email spoofing.
Earlier this month America's FTC also reported that 86% of major online businesses used SPF to help ISPs authenticate their emails -- but fewer than 10% have implemented DMARC.

Comments

"Could We Eliminate Spam With DMARC?"

[rainwalker]

"No."

See, that was easy! Technological solution to a sociological problem, and so on.

Barracuda

[darkpixel2k]

I'm not impressed with Barracuda. A client made a decision to buy a Barracuda against my recommendations. I installed it and couldn't find DMARC settings anywhere. It turns out they support validating inbound DMARC, but they won't sign anything outbound. I had to set up an external Haraka mail server that blindly accepted all mail from the IP of their Barracuda, signed it, and attempted to deliver it. It's such a pile of garbage.

On another note, if you send a ~45 MB attachment to the device, apparently it clogs up and refuses to deliver. Other mail will go through without problems, but you have to call their tech support to 'force' it through.

Barracuda is a terrible, over-priced, barely-functional product.

I think that's bolocks!

[0ryn]

Most of the spam that I get comes from hacked accounts where people have used crap passwords that are easily guessed.