Spam

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Sun Jan 25 01:57:06 CET 2009


Jim Ancona wrote:
> No, looking at the headers, almost certainly not. Someone simply
> forged Mickey's address using their email client. I receive spam
> "From" my address all the time. The only difference is that they sent
> it through the mailing list.

Indeed. Readers should exercise common sense when seeing mail from people, 
especially relatively well-known people in the community, which seems out of 
character or nonsensical before jumping to conclusions about that person 
becoming a spammer, going over to the Dark Side, and so on.

> A better rule (which I have just violated) is not to reply at all,
> since it just clutters the list.

To avoid some problems with forged mail, I recommend setting up an SPF policy 
record:

http://www.openspf.org/

See the "Deploying SPF" part of that page and the associated setup wizard.

When I looked at openmoko.org's DNS records, I couldn't find any evidence of 
SPF policies, so perhaps someone should look into it. And everyone else who 
isn't publishing SPF policies for their domain should consider doing so, 
too - it's a pain to get a deluge of spam backscatter in one's inbox, but you 
can prevent it from happening.

Paul




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