SPF

[Chris Lindley <ch...@zuuk.com>]

SPF support in James:

Having been victim to spammers spoofing one of our domains, we have now 
defined SPF text strings to try and prevent further abuse - though 
unfortunately, without a greater take-up through all mail servers on 
this technology, spam falsely claiming to be from one of our domains 
will continue to get through.

As we are Java specialists and use the James mail server we'd like to 
see SPF support brought into Jakarta James.  There is already a 
sourceforge project to provide a Java library to parse SPF strings 
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/spfjava/) albeit in its infancy, and 
the matcher/mailet architecture of James would mean that it should be 
relatively trivial to write a matcher which retrieves and parses SPF 
strings given access to the DNS.

Is anybody working on this ?
After an initial investigation into how this could be done, the biggest 
barrier is the lack of exposure of the DNS methods from the underlying 
library to matcher code.  Are there any plans to open up the DNS 
interface for use by matcher/mailet code ?  If this were done, then 
adding an SPF matcher would be straight-forward.  As it stands it would 
require a patch to core James code.  We're happy to look into this 
further but prefer not to affect core James code or clash with any other 
work to provide this facility.

-- 
Chris Lindley
www.zuuk.com



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Re: SPF

[Serge Knystautas <se...@lokitech.com>]

Chris Lindley wrote:
> SPF support in James:

Nobody is actively working on it... I think there's some skepticism 
about how effective it can be given the sender-rewriting requirement. 
Support probably wouldn't hurt though.  Or at least instructions on how 
to assemble it.

> As we are Java specialists and use the James mail server we'd like to 
> see SPF support brought into Jakarta James.  There is already a 
> sourceforge project to provide a Java library to parse SPF strings 
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/spfjava/) albeit in its infancy, and 
> the matcher/mailet architecture of James would mean that it should be 
> relatively trivial to write a matcher which retrieves and parses SPF 
> strings given access to the DNS.
> 
> Is anybody working on this ?

I do not believe anyone has said publicly so.  You can search the 
mailing list archives though.

> After an initial investigation into how this could be done, the biggest 
> barrier is the lack of exposure of the DNS methods from the underlying 
> library to matcher code.  Are there any plans to open up the DNS 
> interface for use by matcher/mailet code ?  If this were done, then 
> adding an SPF matcher would be straight-forward.  As it stands it would 
> require a patch to core James code.  We're happy to look into this 
> further but prefer not to affect core James code or clash with any other 
> work to provide this facility.

I can see how it's useful, though I'm not sure if it's been discussed. 
We are right now pushing to get some releases out before we do much 
redesign of the mailet or James APIs.

You can lookup the DNSServer using the Avalon lookup mechanism.  We're 
not big fans of using that lookup architecture, but should work.

-- 
Serge Knystautas
President
Lokitech >> software . strategy . design >> http://www.lokitech.com
p. 301.656.5501
e. sergek@lokitech.com

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