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There is no easy fix for the problem of spam. There is no, and there can be no, universally accepted definition of what constitutes spam. For this reason, any attempt to globally block all incoming spam is bound to fail because it leads to false positives — you don't get legitimate mail because it is wrongly classified as spam.
Many webmail programs such as gmail and yahoo have tools to filter out spam for you and put it in a separate folder. For those who use other mail clients, there are programs like spamassassin and pine's filter to filter out the spam.
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.qmail file. Spam doesn't reply to the confirmation, so you don't see the spam.
Gerrit Pape
: 2003
On the other hand, it seems that a lot of people (almost 20,000 domains) are using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records on DNS to confirm that the sender MTA is official for a domain (by now are used only for testing purposes)."
SPF is a good solution, but it's still only a band-aid until everyone uses it. You'll just see spammers start forging from obscure, poorly-maintained domains. I'd rather force the spammers to properly implement SMTP than simply scurry under a different rock.
Basically, we're doing something that I've been on the wrong side of more than a few times: we're restricting access to our services to "legitimate" use only. We know what assumptions we can make, so now we need to find a way to make it the hardest we can for the "enemy" to keep up. SPF is a pretty shallow slope to climb, but properly implementing temporary failure handling is non-trivial.
SPF Project : Feb 2007