"AOL is conducting a trial of a new e-mail protocol called Sender Permitted From, or SPF, across its entire user base of 33 million subscribers. The company hopes that SPF will eliminate e-mail forgeries by enabling organizations to specify which servers are allowed to send mail on behalf of their Internet domain, according to AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham.
"SPF stops e-mail address spoofing by modifying the Domain Name System (DNS) to declare which servers can send mail from a particular Internet domain. AOL is using SPF to publish the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the servers it uses to send outgoing e-mail," reports the IDG News Service.
"The long term benefit of SPF is that, when the technology is widely deployed, e-mail providers will be able to associate reputations with Internet domains rather than with IP addresses, which are harder to track, according to Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, who gave a presentation on SPF during January's Spam Conference 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge."
