According to Microsoft officials, the Redmond giant will begin to implement SPF or Sender ID checking to it's spam fighting efforts on Hotmail, Microsoft.com and MSN.com. They won't block e-mail that isn't verified by the SPF technology. Instead those e-mails will be subject to more traditional spam filtering techniques.
The company is strongly urging e-mail providers and Internet service providers to publish, by mid-September, Sender Policy Framework records that identify their e-mail servers in the domain name system. Microsoft will begin matching the source of inbound e-mail to the Internet Protocol addresses of e-mail servers listed in that sending domain's SPF record by October 1.
Messages that fail the check will not be rejected but will be further scrutinized and filtered, says Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft's Safety Technology and Strategy Group.
You can read more about the technology and principles behind SPF in a posting we did back in March.
1. So the PR people publish this, it gets misinterpreted by the non-techies covering it for various media outlets, and a customer calls us asking if they need SPF to stop their email being blocked. There is more fear and confusion around spam than fact, and this is not helping.
So, MS says SPF is important and everyone should do it Real Soon Now? Guess which of these domains has an SPF record published, as of Aug 3 ....
a. microsoft.com
b. hotmail.com
c. msn.com
d. xbox.com
e. None of the above
For those without ready access to /usr/bin/dig, try this URL ....
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?type=TXT&domain=microsoft.com
Posted at 4:49AM on Dec 19th 2005 by David Crooke