Spamcop mail changes

Spamcop is shutting down it’s email service. While anyone could report spam using Spamcop, the system also provided users email addresses behind the Spamcop filters. This shut down should have no major impact on senders. Email addresses in use will still be accepting email, but that mail will simply be forwarded to another address, instead of users being able to access it through POP or IMAP.
The one problem some senders may have is IF they are solely authenticating through SPF and they are publishing a p=reject DMARC statement. This may result in some of the mail being rejected at the forwarding mail server, like AOL, Yahoo and other services respecting DMARC policy statements.
User forwarded mail will be coming from 68.232.142.20 (esa1.spamcop.iphmx.com) and 68.232.142.151 (esa2.spamcop.iphmx.com). If you don’t want to apply DMARC policy to known forwarded mail, those are the IPs to special case.

Related Posts

June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

Read More

DMARC and organizations

Comcast recently published a statement on DMARC over on their postmaster page. The short version is that Comcast is publishing a DMARC record, but has no current intentions to publish a p=reject policy for Comcast user email. Comcast will be publishing a p=reject for some of their domains that they use exclusively to communicate with customers, like billing notices and security notices.
Comcast does point out that Yahoo! and AOL’s usage of p=reject is “not common usage.”
This is something a lot of people have been arguing loudly about on various mail operations lists and network lists. DMARC is about organizational identity. In fact, I was contacted about my DMARC primer and told that I didn’t mention that it’s not about domains, it’s about organizations.
The way I read the DMARC spec, it is all about organizational identity. The underlying theme being that the domain name is linked to a particular organization and everyone using email at that domain has some official relationship with that organization. I’ve always read the spec mentally replacing organization with corporate brand. This was for brands and organizations that strictly control how their domains are used, who can use those domains and how the mail is sent with those domains.
I never expected any mailbox provider or commercial ISP to publish a p=reject message as it would just break way too much of the way customers use email. And it did break a lot of legitimate and end user uses of email. Many organizations have had to scramble to update mailing list software to avoid bouncing users off the lists. Some of these upgrades have broken mailbox filters, forcing endusers to change how they manage their mailboxes.
Even organizations see challenges with a p=reject message and can have legitimate mail blocked. At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco I was talking with some folks who have been actively deploying DMARC for organizations. From my point of view anyone who wants to publish a DMARC p=reject should spend at least 6 months monitoring DMARC failures to identify legitimate sources of email. The person I was talking to said he recommends a minimum of 12 months.
This is just an example of how difficult it is to capture all the legitimate sources of emails from a domain and effectively authenticate that mail. For a mailbox provider, I think it’s nearly impossible to capture all the legitimate uses of email and authenticate them.
It remains to be seen if the other mailbox providers imitate Yahoo! and AOL or if they push back against the use of DMARC reject policies at mailbox providers. Whatever the outcome, this is a significant shift in how email is used. And we’re all going to have to deal with the fallout of that.

Read More

AOL publishes a p=reject DMARC record

Yesterday I mentioned that there were reports of a compromise at AOL. While the details are hazy, what has been reported is that people’s address books were stolen. The reports suggest lots of people are getting mail from AOL addresses that they have received mail from in the past, but that mail is coming from non AOL servers. In an apparent effort to address this, AOL announced today they have published a p=reject DMARC record.
I expect this also means that AOL is now checking and listening to DMARC records on the inbound. During the discussions of who was checking DMARC during the Yahoo discussion, AOL was not one of the ISPs respecting DMARC policy statements. I’m not surprised. As more information started coming out about this compromise, I figured that the folks attacking Yahoo had moved on to AOL and that AOL’s response would be similar to Yahoo’s.
My prediction is that the attackers will be trying to get into Outlook.com and Gmail, and when they do, those ISPs will follow suit in publishing p=reject messages. For those of you wondering what DMARC is about, you can check out my DMARC primer.

Read More