Spammers Like New Anti-Spam Standards (thats bad news)

The idea behind Sender Policy Framework was to establish a protocol to identify the actual source address of messages. Messages that fail to "authenticate" would be removed by spam filters either on the server or end user's system.

The problem is - many spammers don't have any real problem identifying themselves. A lot of spam is sent from legitimate domains without any form of "spoofing". People tend to forget that spamming itself isn't in anyway illegal (CAN-SPAM didn't do anything of the sort). When the spammers play by the rules - Sender Policy Framework doesn't do anything to help spam killers.

The missing piece of the system seems to be a list of known senders of junk email. Without that component - there's no way to tell if the certified sender is a known spammer or not.

This would be roughly equivalent to the DNS blacklists that are already used to block known senders of unwanted email messages.

Until someone sorts this presumably brilliant system out - the best way for end users to block spam is with a client-side spam e-mail blocker such as SpamButcher.

Full Spam Related Story