Joe Emenaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Although others have already given reasons why, I figured I'd toss in > the analogy to explain why the dude from CypherTrust in the article is > lacking in clue:
The SpamAssassin development team has been aware of SPF pass results for spam since May (at the very latest). That's right, 4 months ago. And that's why a SPF pass result in SpamAssassin 3.0 won't give any bonus to mail. For now, passes merely informational until we start tying them to known good domains. However, we do assign small penalties to SPF failures since that is an indicator of forgery. One early mention of this was this thought attached to bug 3169 where Theo Van Dinter noted on 2004-05-10: > [...] the FPs for SPF_PASS are valid here, btw. same spammer > (judging by the same IP range) with a bunch of domains with valid > SPF records. SPF_HELO_PASS seem to be from ISPs with SPF records, > so that should be valid as well. > > since SPF isn't a spam indicator, just a forgery indicator, as long > as the hits are valid, I'm ok with the results [...] SPF and Sender-ID were never intended to block spam on their own. They are only used for authentication. Ciphertrust may know this, but they deserve flack for passing off these results as anything newsworthy. Daniel -- Daniel Quinlan http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/
