The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

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Wednesday, January 10, 2018

I still find SPF not worth integrating into my email server

The other day, I came across this article about using SPF to avoid large delays using greylisting (link via Lobsters). I've experienced those delays from time to time since I run a greylist daemon and this does seem like a neat idea. But I've already ironed out those large delays (it's been awhile since the last one) so I have very little incentive to implement this.

This did however get me to ask if I should integrate SPF with the greylist daemon.

Then I thought, didn't I already do this?

It turns out I did! Three years ago.

Well … okay then!

Have things changed over the past three years? I spent a few hours over the past few days getting the code up and running, so let's see—over the past month (December 10th to January 10th):

Unique emails processed by the greylist daemon
Emails accepted2,515
Emails rejected2,319
Total 4,834

Aside from the volume (which appears to be a bit less than 50% of what it was three years ago, but that could be due to the time of year), the ratio is similar—50% of the email is spam that is immedately filtered out.

The one major change though, is that back then, around 12½% only had SPF records, whereas today, it's about 12½% don't have SPF records. That's interesting. But the rest of the figures are again, similar to last time:

Results of applying SPF policy against incoming email
fail93IP address was not allowed to send this email
softfail79IP address should not be sending this email (used for testing)
neutral11IP address has no policy
pass962IP address is allowed to send this email

Those with a neutral SPF policy have gone down, and the failure rate is up a bit (4% vs. 1% back then) but the overall conclusion is the same—not worth it.

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