SPF Helps Fight Email Spoofing
Posted on July 18th, 2007
Okay so I’m sure you have heard of SPF in your sun lotion but what does that have to do with email?Â
SPF is an acronym for Sender Policy Framework. SPF is used to help prevent spammers from forging emails. A forged email is when someone tries to send an email as you but from their own machine or server.
What happens is a spammer end up sending out 1000’s and 1000’s of emails using your email address (usually they use a email harvester to get your email address from the web). Of those 1000’s of emails a large percentage of them fail and send back a postmaster return error usually saying that email does not exist. Those emails don’t get sent to the person forging the emails but to the real email address. Please note that the spammer has not hacked your email and email password but is using a script to send out the forged emails using your email address obtained from a harvester.
SPF is not an anti-spam solution but is a tool we can use to help prevent spammers from sending out fake emails. All of our servers work with SPF and you can create your own SPF by using the SPF Setup Wizard. Once you have created your SPF open a ticket and have one of our support staff install it for you.
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3 Comments
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Great entry!
Well, I just had SPF entries added to my domain record, and we look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen. My other domain was harvested, and spammers had a field day for the past couple of years making up From: email addresses at that domain.
I’m not sure why, but Yahoo’s spam blockers are preventing my mail from getting through to Yahoo email addresses. Out of 7 messages, 2 went to bulk mail, 2 got lost, and 3 hit the inbox.
I submitted a ticket to both bluefur and yahoo, and we’ll see what happens next.
Peas on dirt,
Tony
Would this then put the “mailed by: domain.com” in the email’s header?
I believe it is put in the dns zone file.