Spam and SMTP authentication

I came in yesterday to my normal monday morning 1000+ emails.  Even after spamasassin (which I have set to be fairly liberal to avoid false positives) and outlook have done their worse, I still  have a few hundred left.  I am starting to lose real emails to real people and frankly getting pretty grumpy about it.

An earlier thread tried to classify spam, but actually at present the real problem mails are:

1. Bounces from people I never sent mail to.  They bounce either because the mail was incoirrectly addressed or contains a virus. 
2. Mass mails from people with forged email headers.  I don’t bother blocking those email addresses because I know they are not real. As they are 95% of the total I don’t bother blocking emails any more.

If we could make sure that a mail from was REALLY from yyy.com then life would be sweeter wouldn’t it.  Blacklists and whitelists would work, I would stop getting bounces from people I never mailed, all would be sweetnes and light.

Thus SPF, Caller ID and Domain keys.  Three initiatives to fix this problem.  There is a good overview here for the perplexed.

But will all this solve the problem?

I can see spammers buying real domain names now by the tens of thousands - you know spam00001.com spam00002.com etc.  Then setting up real servers with real domain keys etc.  All wil be for nought unless the domain registration people start planning now to stop this.  World wide. 

I don’t think it is going to happen.

Bob
Textor Webmasters Ltd