SPF: Introduction

SPF: Introduction:

"The Problem: Sender Address Forgery

Today, nearly all abusive e-mail messages carry fake sender addresses. The victims whose addresses are being abused often suffer from the consequences, because their reputation gets diminished and they have to disclaim liability for the abuse, or waste their time sorting out misdirected bounce messages.

You probably have experienced one kind of abuse or another of your e-mail address yourself in the past, e.g. when you received an error message saying that a message allegedly sent by you could not be delivered to the recipient, although you never sent a message to that address.

Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people's confidence in its reliability. That is why your bank never sends you information about your account by e-mail and keeps making a point of that fact.

But it does not have to be this way!"