Email

Email

by Mike Masnick




Spammers Using Authentication Faster Than Legit Emailers

from the doesn't-necessarily-bode-well... dept

It's still quite early in the effort to get email servers to use some form of authentication. While the focus lately has been about all the various standards, and which one is going to get adopted, many still question whether or not sender authentication actually does anything to stop spam. A recent study certainly suggests that spammers don't think so. It notes that more spam than legitimate email is currently using sender authentication. That's right. While most companies are still figuring out exactly what's going on, spammers are pushing ahead and publishing their own authentication records -- and then spamming away. It doesn't build much confidence.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Aug 31st, 2004 @ 4:26pm
  • This is good

    by Brad

    This is good, the owners of those machines can be held accountable or blocked.

    SPF is working as designed.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • Aug 31st, 2004 @ 8:10pm
    • Re: This is good

      by John Rubier

      Or maybe we should just start blocking SPF mail.
      We could come out with a new "anti spam scheme" every so often, then just block it as it'll be the spammers that are the early adopters. ;)

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • Sep 1st, 2004 @ 6:56pm
    • Re: This is good

      This product may be interesting for you or any IT/IS exec at a corporation with email security issues. There really isn't any solutions or even methodolody (whitelisting, DNS lookups, source definitions, challenge/response, sender authentication) that works without a lot of false positives.

      This new thing actually seems too good to be true, but it might actually be what the world needs - going back to the basics by channeling contacts and not using reactive techniques, but instead a preventative one.

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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