Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 14:19:59 -0400
From: Meng Weng Wong <mengwong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: SPF ready for media coverage
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
m
On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 06:28:59AM -0500, Dave Farber wrote:
| Funny, I gave a talk a month ago on this. Time to act.
|
| Survey: Spam Is Starting to Hurt E-Mail, Erode People's Trust
| in the Internet World
|
Everybody agrees that it's time to do something, but nobody knows quite
what to do. I'm doing SPF.
At ISPcon I announced SPF, and spoke with a number of high-ups at Yahoo,
Earthlink, and other ISPs.
Miles Libbey, product manager for Yahoo Mail, had already heard of it,
and relayed to me some of the objections of his tech staff; I assured
him those problems had all been solved in the latest version of the
spec.
I had dinner with Anne Mitchell of ISIPP, Suresh Ramasubramaniam of
Outblaze, Neil Schwartzmann who publishes SpamNews, and Catherine
Hampton who wrote SpamBouncer. They all liked SPF.
People who had their own pet anti-spam schemes seemed to consider SPF an
enabling technology for their work. During Q&A, I was a little
surprised and quite pleased when the others people on my panel started
talking about SPF as part of their solutions.
So ISPcon went well.
The mailing list is at almost 200 subscribers and there are signs we've
hit critical mass: people are writing independent implementations,
web-based syntax validators, that sort of thing. We've even got a
celebrity or two: this month ESR joined the list and declared himself a
strong supporter.
Now the challenge is getting the word out.
SPF has gotten some press. It was featured on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
LiveJournal (recently the victim of a joe-job) has decided to publish
SPF records soon.
Even the shadowy AI that is Google PageRank has given us its blessing.
(We're the top hit for "SPF".)
Lots of small and medium-sized domains are publishing SPF records every day.
So it's time to move past "the sky is falling": the public wants to know
what people are doing about spam.
And ISPs in particular want to know what they can do right now.
Legislative and economic solutions are far away: it just isn't practical
to sue spammers or implement micropayments.
As a sign of how mature SPF is, the biggest disagreement on the mailing
list this week has been whether DNS records should use underscores or
dashes. When the arguments are all aesthetic you know it's ready to go.
If any journalists might be interested in a story about SPF and other
anti-spam proposals being created by the ASRG and others, I'll be ready
to give interviews starting next week (27 Oct onwards). You can contact
me at mengwong@xxxxxxxxxx
Further reading:
http://www.irtf.org/asrg/asrg_documents.htm
http://www.taugh.com/ links to a survey of technical anti-spam measures
http://spf.pobox.com/
cheers
meng