Re: [Asrg] spam down?

Chris Lewis <clewis+ietf@mustelids.ca> Wed, 30 January 2013 15:40 UTC

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Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:40:06 -0500
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] spam down?
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On 13-01-30 09:27 AM, Dotzero wrote:

> I think it depends on what you mean by "relatively little effect".
>>From my perspective - given the current statof adoption - it may not
> have an effect on the overall ecosystem but it is certainly pushing
> the bad guys from abusing (sending) domains that are implementing
> strong email auth efforts to ones that are not.

If that were true, I wouldn't be seeing millions of paypal, linkedin,
et. al. impersonations a day.  But I do.

Validation is so irrelevant that the spammers impersonate sites when
it's clearly unnecessary.  They use their facebook impersonation
templates to send out pill spam for crissakes.  If validation was making
a difference, the ROI would suffer.  I can only guess it isn't.

The reality is that you don't have to forge the From/sender/helo et. al.
to successfully impersonate any domain.  Especially with the mail
readers oh-so-carefully _not_ showing you the actual email address.

> It would be interesting to see (I don't have the data) if there is any
> kind of shift from sending spam targeting accounts at mailbox
> providers that validate to targeting (preferentially) accounts at
> mailbox providers that don't.

Most spoofers are already bypassing validation.  So why would it matter
to them whether the mailbox provider is validating or not?