- Will SPF/Microsoft Hybrid Stop SMTP Burn?
- Placing Blame Where Blame Is Due
- How Sender ID Works
- Fear Factor, Hope Factory
- Sender IDeology
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Placing Blame Where Blame Is Due
Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) has holes you could drive a gassed-up airliner through—and spammers do. The overall problem is the ease of forging the originator's identity. The result is the current explosion of spam (spammers almost never use their own addresses), and its concomitant black rain:
fraud
narcotics offered without prescriptions or regard for age
Joe jobs (spam calculated to elicit server-bending loads of hate mail to a forged return address)
virus and worm attacks
phishing scams (letters forged to appear to be from financial institutions such as credit card issuers or PayPal, offering links to phony login forms that capture financial identity data)
Legitimate sites are hemorrhaging resources on spam wounds, and the companies around them are bleeding productivity through these holes in SMTP. If the holes that allow forged mail to reach target servers were plugged, a terrific amount of today's spam would stop. What Sender ID can do is less direct (and so, at first sight, less grand), but it's still tremendous: Sender ID can eventually stop a high percentage of spam overall—and many message bodies of forged mail—for those domains set up to participate. The participating administrator can bounce the forged mail, pass it to the intended recipient with a warning, or do whatever he pleases with it. Spamming from addresses that don't belong to the spammer just won't work when enough domains register on Sender ID–participating sites (and when enough of the world turns its back on mailers who stay outside the system).