Is Your Domain Spammy?
Saturday, April 14, 2007 18:01I was just checking the DNS report for Kavinda.Net today and noticed I had not set my SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records!
This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from my domain. If you are receiving delivery failure notices for a message that you didn’t send, it’s likely that someone is already ’spoofing’ your domain name.
By adding a SPF record in our DNS entries, we can provide a way for the recipients mail servers to check against these records to ensure that our email is coming to them from a server which is actually permitted to send email on behalf of our domain. This will help to stop forged emails and thus decrease spam, as almost always forged email addresses send us spam!
For those of you who are using Google Apps, here is what you need to add.
Manjula says:
April 17th, 2007 at 10:19 am
There’re two areas first is your domain must publish this information in an SPF record in the domains DNS zone, and when somebody’s mail server receives a message saying to come from that domain, , then secondly the receiving server should check whether the message complies with the domain’s policy e.g., the message comes from an unknown server, it can be considered a fake.
I must praise google for one more time…
mydomain.net. TXT "v=spf1 mx a:your.mail.net include:gmail.com -all"
everything considered legitimate by gmail.com is also legitimate for your.mail.net, too
Recently our 26 down stream vISP mail servers were denied by Spamhaus due undefined SPF. Spamhaus claims to be one of the Internet’s biggest spam blocking systems and maintains that its primary objective is to avoid false positives while blocking as much spam as possible.
However this led to the automated rejection of thousands of legitimate emails causing considerable damage to the ongoing business of ours and customers, and of course to Spamhaus claim that “false positives are extremely rare”. It is so hard for xSPs to battle with these anonymous organisations unwilling to provide evidence of anything.
kavinda says:
April 17th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Thanks for this extra info.
By the way, would you happen to be Manjula Kularathne from Ananda College 95 batch?
Abdul says:
April 17th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
i am experiencing the same situation on my old niche website. i usually get around 5-10 delivery failure emails. btw did anyone try an app called "mailboy 2004" ? it allows you to spoof your email address and it also contains a dedicated smtp server.
Manjula says:
April 19th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Spot on!
and you did. It’s been a while…isn’t it? perhaps a decade! I found your site through Sampath’s blog. So how have you been? It’s nice to find you again after school days.
I expected you to recognize me
Where were you all this time? I left SL in mid ‘05 ending 7 years Dialog career and now settled in Sydney.
So why not drop a line to my gmail so we could K.I.T.
Cheers,
Manjula