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

toad.social

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

#231

Post by wruza »

trod1234 wrote: post #221
wruza wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frustration doesn't come naturally. It comes with shitty software design. "I don't know" is not a problem, you learn and you know, no frustration. The problem is "I spent N hours/days on a thing that everyone does and which is a 99.99% of use cases and boils down to just having a keyfile in a proper(?) location and this knowledge doesn't translate effing nowhere". would you say the same about DBA operations or would…

You are mistaken. Your reasoning is flawed because the heuristics you use are flawed, and the consequences of the heuristics are the reason you are frustrated. There are critical tools that you clearly have not learned, and likely were never taught. Tools that have been around since the time of the Greeks. This is evident in your use of poorly defined language running you indirectly in a circular path (trauma/torture…

You’re just arrogant here imo, and I regret the time spent on elaborating. Your comment is straight from the 25 years ago when it was normal to read toxic lectures to lame noobs on forums and create software that has no last mile connection to reality. I’m glad that that era is long over except for a few remnants. Have a regular day.

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

#232

Post by Suzuran »

carlosjobim wrote: post #223
Suzuran wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point to sending the spam is to enable further crime. Do you really think they don't stand to profit from what they promote? Spam is a business like any other, they aren't going to magically disappear just because their advertising costs suddenly become non-zero. Just like how they found ways of shifting the costs of hosting mail servers onto others, they will find ways of shifting the costs of any "email postage…

This is very basic mathematics. If they have to do other crime to get their hands on the cash it would cost for them to spam, then why spam at all instead of only focusing on the other, more profitable crime? Spam by definition is mass messaging. If the price per message is higher than the expected return per message, it becomes pointless.

Spam is advertising for their other more profitable criminal enterprises. It's a means to an end, not an end itself. If the goal were simply to send messages, there would be no content.

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

#233

Post by witrak »

trod1234 wrote: post #217
pas wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS flat out refuses to unblock our IP on their "outlook protection" racket despite many attempts through their self-service website. Our IP is the same for the last ... ~5 years now? Is it because we did not buy a /24? is it because we are so small they have no real reputation data? who knows!

In my experience, MS and others give you a chance to correct the issue and if you don't do so in a timely manner (which requires qualified help), or it isn't corrected, then you get blackholed thereafter, and will remain that way up to years afterwards. There is very little interaction from them, they assume you'll be professional enough to read the published literature and act accordingly. The literature is a way of…

>The literature is a way of adding cost to those that would send spam, it also adds cost in other ways.

It is an oversimplified way of evaluating of consequences of overwhelming control the two monopolists have over access of small providers to email services. And it leads to wrong conclusions at least in respect to the range of its influence. Yes, it makes difficult life for the small amateur spammers as strongly as for beginner administrators and service providers.

However while for the determined spammers to hire experts isn't a problem for small entrepreneurs and for non-profit personal activities it is a blocking barrier.

Of course, they can use the services of established providers with all the limitations and other disadvantages of such solutions or accept slavery joining millions of users and firms accepting full and unlimited control of MS and Google (to their undisguised satisfaction).

About the consequences of sudden and totally unexpected interruption of email services without giving reasons we all can read often enough.

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

#234

Post by blacklion »

lillecarl wrote: post #143
blacklion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google thinks it is in Russia too. And Cloudflare thinks the same.

If it's Hurricane Electrics tunnel I've had similiar issues, I think they use Russian blocks for their IPv6 tunnel since the abuse potential is so high and they don't want to deal with it so they just bundle all their shit with Russia and move on.

Yep, it is HE tunnel. Nice to know that I'm not alone.

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

#235

Post by blacklion »

liveoneggs wrote: post #135
blacklion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google thinks it is in Russia too. And Cloudflare thinks the same.

maybe you actually have a MITM proxy stealing all of your traffic and keystrokes

MITM for HTTPS? I don't think so!

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

#236

Post by Justsignedup »

jeroenhd wrote: 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 someone who set these up, I can tell you, the answer is rather simple:

- spammers have 1 system to set up in order to spam. They get it right.

- company admins have dozens of projects, of which this is a tiny one, with zero ROI to the bottom line (if people don't consider how critical security is). So they delay.

- companies often have dozens of systems integrated, when I set up DMARC/DKIM the first time for my company, a bunch of email tools broke, we had to do a bunch of leg work, took us a month end-to-end. The value was recognized when we almost lost 20k to a "ceo emails you" scam. But until then it wasn't a priority.

- we didn't even have a full IT, i just stepped in because I cared enough.

- my current company has a dedicated security team. These holes are plugged VERY quickly.

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

#237

Post by carlosjobim »

Suzuran wrote: post #232
carlosjobim wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very basic mathematics. If they have to do other crime to get their hands on the cash it would cost for them to spam, then why spam at all instead of only focusing on the other, more profitable crime? Spam by definition is mass messaging. If the price per message is higher than the expected return per message, it becomes pointless.

Spam is advertising for their other more profitable criminal enterprises. It's a means to an end, not an end itself. If the goal were simply to send messages, there would be no content.

And the efficiency of spam is so low, that with a high enough cost per message, it would not be a net gain for the spammers. If you pay a million dollars to send a million messages, but only gain $100 000 from the subsequent scams, then it's a bad venture.

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

#238

Post by graemep »

scarab92 wrote: post #228
graemep wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft seems to be the most common culprit.

Agree. I don’t understand why Microsoft are so bad at this? They have access to a large percentage of all email traffic to train domain reputation, and spam detection models on yet seem to be notorious for both false positives and false negatives. Google’s spam filters are far more accurate.

I think they cannot be bothered. Their customers are more tied in than Google's and are not going to switch because a small proportion of emails are rejected.

More specifically they seem to rely IP reputation rather than domain reputation, and IPs do change hands, especially for smaller servers.

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

#239

Post by Avamander »

kbolino wrote: post #183
Avamander wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible idea, SPF is very hostile to (legitimate) forwarding. In general SPF should actually die.

If you have trusted forwarders, you just add them to the SPF policy (which can be recursive, though there is a pretty low limit on how many records can be looked up). I've not had an issue with this, personally. However, assuming DKIM can be tightened up as proposed above, I'm not sure SPF would be necessary anymore.

There are quite a few problems with that. Biggest issue is that it would require the domain owner's explicit cooperation with each forwarder. It would also allow more than just forwarding existing letters. Real-life shows that SPF really doesn't work with forwarders and it probably never will.

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

#240

Post by fc417fc802 »

trod1234 wrote: post #221
wruza wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frustration doesn't come naturally. It comes with shitty software design. "I don't know" is not a problem, you learn and you know, no frustration. The problem is "I spent N hours/days on a thing that everyone does and which is a 99.99% of use cases and boils down to just having a keyfile in a proper(?) location and this knowledge doesn't translate effing nowhere". would you say the same about DBA operations or would…

You are mistaken. Your reasoning is flawed because the heuristics you use are flawed, and the consequences of the heuristics are the reason you are frustrated. There are critical tools that you clearly have not learned, and likely were never taught. Tools that have been around since the time of the Greeks. This is evident in your use of poorly defined language running you indirectly in a circular path (trauma/torture…

To summarize. His complaint is common tasks involving commonly used software that are fairly simple but the software remains obtuse for some reason.

Your response is that he ought to read the standards and implement things himself. That the frustration is due to a skill issue, not to deficiencies in the software.

Or do I misunderstand?

I feel like the only thing missing here is the recommendation to do it all in assembler. To "build character" or something.

I suppose that technically you're correct, in the sense that if he were more skilled he likely wouldn't be as frustrated. Such an observation hardly invalidates the complaint about poorly designed software though.

There's nothing wrong with someone who wants to roll their own but most people most of the time want an out of the box solution. It's inevitable given the level of complexity involved in the modern tech stack. Building all of it from scratch by yourself simply isn't realistic.

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