Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - How to use it to Fight Email Forgery

By Joe Duchesne


Spam is a real problem today. Forged email is a big part of the spam problem. Have you ever received a spam email from yourself? How many times have you received an email you know to be spam from someone only to find out it came from an invalid email address? When you try to block the email by choosing block sender, the spammer simply changes the email address to another variation and gets through the block. Until recently, there wasn't much you could do about it. Now there is.

What is Sender Policy Framework (SPF)?

SPF makes it easy for a domain, whether it's an ISP, a business, or a school to say that they only send mail from certain machines. If any other machine is claiming to send mail, they are lying. SPF aims to prevent spammers from ruining other people's reputation. When your machine receives an email from another server that has implemented SPF, your machine can easily tell if the incoming email really comes from the server it says it belongs to. More information about SPF can be found at http://spf.pobox.com/

By implementing SPF in your favorite application or on your server, you can be sure that a spammer will never be able to impersonate you when spamming others. Most well known domains and email applications have already implemented SPF on their servers and products. Some examples of vendors that are already implementing SPF into their products include Sophos, Symantec, Declude Junkmail, Brightmail, IronPort, Ciphertrust, MailArmory, MailFrontier, Roaring Penguin Software, Communigate Pro, and others.

Ready to fight email forgery? Install applications that support SPF today and get protected from email forgery!


This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/, a web hosting company that specializes in helping online business owners increase their website traffic. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely as long as you link back to my website from this resource box.

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