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Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

toad.social

171–180 of 261 posts

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#171
Things have gone in the direction of being favorable for spammers.

* WHOIS is effectively destroyed.

* Companies like Cloudflare actively protect known spammers & scammers, and have made abuse reporting time consuming and error prone.

* Consolidation of most email to several large players means filtering them causes problems.

* Large delivery companies such as Sendgrid, Salesforce and Google basically do nothing about reported abuse.

Yes, most spammers these days that set up their own domains have tools to make sure DKIM, SPF and DMARC are all good, but consider that we can't know anything about these spammers: TLS certificates no longer contain contact information, large providers don't provide useful WHOIS, don't forward abuse complaints, have no clue what an SOA record is, and so on.

The way things should work is that we get a spam, we see the network from which the spam came through WHOIS, we forward the spam to their abuse address or the address they list in WHOIS, and we're done.

The way things work is that they don't have working information in WHOIS, they ignore the abuse complaints, they act like they don't know what to do with it, or they reply with a form email saying to go and use a web page where it takes time and work to paste in each part of a spam.

I blame the large companies who do this. Make reporting abuse difficult and you'll get much less reported abuse.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason For what it's worth, I've started seeing cybersecurity insurers requiring riders and extra payments if you don't block Russian IPs.

Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server. Unless you own a globa…

just close the tcp sockets and you wont even notice them trying to connect and failing

do you also log everyone who looks at your house? it's a self inflicted problem

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#173
post #5

For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…

As a non-email guy, I can tell you that if a system that boils down to having an (optionally certified?) key requires much more than just putting it into a folder with a domain name and running a service, it’s badly designed and has unnecessary complexity. Which will result into abusers having more expertise than legitimate users. The fact that you can “get” DMARC SPF DKIM wrong, while it’s basically a hard requirement for operation, is just screaming something important to the email software.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#174
post #125
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these technologies are basically DOA because of how fickle they are and for lack of support across the board. Most policies are set to not to deny. DMARC is nice though. It won't stop spam. It won't stop spoofing. But you will know that someone somewhere is spamming people using your domain name. How awesome. :)

I never found the DMARC reports actionable, so I quickly turned them off. What do you do with the information? Of course, even with hard fail spf and dmarc, I still see some bounces from spam where some server accepted the mail to deliver it elsewhere and the next server denies it, so the first server sends me a bounce.

DMARC reports are for you to be sure that you configured SPF/DKIM correctly, not asking you to do something with the spoofing senders (which you can do absolutely nothing about).

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#175
post #5

For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…

The problems I noticed were, it doesn't matter what the SPF and DKIM look like. If Google or Microsoft refuse to relay your email based on secret internal factors then you're out of business.

Microsoft seems to be the most common culprit.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#176
post #90
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, a comment that understands the concepts instead of insolently ranting about how useless it is.

It feels similar to people conflating green https check marks in browsers and trustworthiness.

exactly!

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#177

Naively I thought that one value proposition of SPF, DKIM and DMARC is that reputation shifts from based on IP to be based on domain, once you set these up correctly. So as long as you can maintain a good reputation for your domain and have SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly set up, then you can host your SMTP server at any IP and your emails will get delivered. I wonder why it doesn't work this way.

Cause IP is a finite resource (even IPv6 where the granularity is more like /48) while domains are infinite.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#178
post #170
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with greylisting is that it delays subscription confirmation emails when you sign up for a new service. I found that to be more trouble than it was worth. YMMV.

For a greylisting that sends 451 before DATA, that is indeed a known problem. My server sends 451 after DATA, and keeps a copy of greylisted message, as marked-as-read entry in separate folder. Those are deleted after few hours, or moved out after a successful delivery retry.

That's a good idea. I was using an off-the-shelf greylister that didn't work that way, but I might implement that strategy now that I'm doing everything myself.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#179
I observe the same thing. However, that does mean that SPF and DKIM are useless (although DMARC probably is).

It is correct that SPF/DKIM does not really avoid spam, because spammers are not stupid and can read these standards like anyone else. However, before SPF/DKIM, I remember that I got a ton of phishing mails with FROM containing "support@paypal.com" or similar. Then came Bayes spam filtering, and that would move legitimate mail from Paypal to spam, because obviously, the phishing mails are quite similar.

This problem has pretty much vanished, because Paypal clearly denotes which IP addresses are allowed to send mails from that domain via SPF and the client can verify the mail via DKIM. For instance, Spamassassin makes sure that mails with correct DKIM and from paypal.com get a massively reduced spam score so that your Bayes filter will not move it to spam. This is hardcoded for a lot of domains (see *welcomelist_dkim.cf).

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#180
post #138

My biggest problem with SPF, DKIM, DMARC is when you go to test this crap there's really only commercial apps. So people who are setting up things for a non-profit or a personal project are either forced to pay after doing 3 or 4 test emails or you wait like 24 hours or some crap. And all that just for the privilege of being able to send email to some gmail accounts. Trying to get email to properly encrypt is pulling…

I built a free DMARC/DKIM/SPF checker: https://dmarcchecker.app/. No usage limits, no ads—just a small footer link to one of my other projects. Made it for the exact reason you mentioned.
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