Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmw_ng 739 days ago
SPF+DKIM+DMARC are a classic case of Goodhart's law, the amount of spam they stop these days (at least anecdotally) is minimal. Most spam I get seems to come via SalesForce infrastructure, and a variety of similar bulk email marketing providers
2 comments

SPF definitely stops most 'stupid' spam (with the second-most valuable metric being EHLO-to-rDNS correspondence). Now, Salesforce and most other non-malicious transactional/list-based SaaSes present other challenges, mostly solved by applying SPF to their content From: header in addition to the SMTP 'mail from' address.

This also involves promoting sender domains from 'DATA reject' to 'MAIL FROM reject' based on behavior, since most spammers see 'MAIL FROM accept' as a win, and won't check any further results.

Proper SPF/DKIM/DMARC at least prevents brand reputation abuse via spoofing (in many cases), which at least blocks a good amount of bullshit phishing and BEC efforts.