JPCass
join:2001-01-23
Denver, CO | When will we see some results? This reminds me of various incidents in the bad old days - including one that resulted in Microsoft vanquishing the old UNIX vendors - with everyone trying to push their own proprietary "standard". While the various standard-bearers are battling for position, little or nothing gets done.
I can't imagine that anything other than a non-proprietary standard like SPF will ever be widely adopted. Whatever else comes along seems likely to only see limited use by corporations and institutions, but that's a profitable market.
What does occur to me as the one hope of some of the tighter proprietary standards, is that a few big ISPs like AOL might implement them and succeed in choking off most of the spam sent to their users. I would guess that a small number of such major IPs harbor most of the users of the sort who would respond to the garbage advertised by spam, and if the spammers are cut off from a large part of their best responding populations, that might really put a crimp in spam.
It also seems to me that even if a simple solution like SPF prevents spoofing, then it makes it possible to implement an effective "whitelist". It doesn't matter if spammers can legitimately create records in SPF or some similar scheme, they still can't send mail to sites implementing some type of whitelisting, and then will have to deal with a much larger volume of return mail and complaints that actually come back to them - which eats up their bandwidth if nothing else. |
