Northport Pipe Band Protected by SPF

* * * PROTECTED BY SPF * * *

What's the problem and how does SPF help to solve it?

Please be advised that Northport-Bagpipes.org does NOT use "____@northport-bagpipes.org" to send out emails of any kind, and certainly not spam.

What's the problem?

Since approximately January 1st of 2007 our domain name has been hijacked by spammers. This means that thousands of people around the globe, perhaps tens of thousands, have received forged email purporting to be from persons@northport-bagpipes.org.

At the least, the mail content is typically an image (meaning a picture of text) of what the spammers are selling, followed by snippets of harmless real text such as a recipe or some sentences from someone's blog. The recipient's email anti-spam program often reads only the harmless text so it does not detect the key words you want it to block. Attachments and/or images are not text and require OCR processing for an anti-spam program to detect blocked keywords. If the sender's name is not black listed, the spam gets through.

In time, our innocent domain email name will be black listed and blocked by all anti-spam programs and the real spammers will simply hijack and start using another (or a hundred other) clean domain name from the Internet. The public will continue receiving the same fraudulent emails but from another innocent "from" domain name. Don't forget, some spam emails are a lot more harmful than simply trying to sell you (or your children) something that you want blocked.

How does SPF help?

Having discovered this fraudulent and possibly illegal activity we have spent much time researching how to combat having our name abused by others. To this end, on January 26th we installed what is called an SPF Record which is expected to identify forged emails claiming to be from our domain, northport-bagpipes.org.

To the best of my knowledge, which admittedly is not that much, this will not in itself block forged email with the return address of anybody@northport-bagpipes.org. However, if your email provider supports it, the anti-spam program that your email carrier provides can reject email sent to you which is not authenticated through the SPF Record. That means, when a spammer sends you forged email claiming to be from northport-bagpipes.org, it will be blocked as a forgery. The same would be true for any forged email where the innocent domain has set up an SPF Record to authenticate their sending domain, provided the anti-spam program on the receiver's end supports SPF Record authentication; not all of them do.

If you are interested, a lot of additional information is available at the Sender Policy Framework project at http://www.openspf.org on the internet. If you are an authority on the SPF Record and would like to correct my representation of any of the above, please feel free to contact me.

Finally, our organization does not use our domain email since it was abused in the past, albeit less universally. Our members only use our individual personal email accounts. At least for the present, if you receive an email from anybody@northport-bagpipe.org it is a forgery and should be deleted.
None of our private email addresses are from somebody@northport-bagpipes.org.

Fight spam and email fraud,
Webmaster, Northport-bagpipes.org

Update

Since some time in early March 2007 we stopped getting notices of rejected emails originating from spammers pretending to be our organization. It appears the SPF record check has worked. For this we're mighty grateful.

Arrived here by search engine?

Click here if no navigation appears on the left.