Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a system for validation of email. It relies on DNS to keep records of what sources are allowed to originate email from the respective domain. What is the type of DNS entry used to hold the list of allowed hosts?
- NS - Name server record
- TXT - Text record
- NSEC - Next Secure record
- APL - Address Prefix List
EXPLANATION
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. More precisely, the current version of SPF — called SPFv1 or SPF Classic — protects the envelope sender address, which is used for the delivery of messages. See the box on the right for a quick explanation of the different types of sender addresses in e-mails.
(There are other solutions that protect the header sender address or that do not care at all about who sent the message, only who originally wrote it.)
Even more precisely, SPFv1 allows the owner of a domain to specify their mail sending policy, e.g. which mail servers they use to send mail from their domain. The technology requires two sides to play together: (1) the domain owner publishesthis information in an SPF record in the domain's DNS zone, and when someone else's mail server receives a message claiming to come from that domain, then (2) the receiving server can check whether the message complies with the domain's stated policy. If, e.g., the message comes from an unknown server, it can be considered a fake.
Once you are confident about the authenticity of the sender address, you can finally "take it for real" and attach reputation to it. While IP-address-based reputation systems like Spamhaus or SpamCop have prevailed so far, reputation will increasingly be based on domains and even individual e-mail addresses in the future, too. Furthermore, additional kinds of policies are planned for a future version of SPF, such as asserting that all of a domain's outgoing mail is S/MIME or PGP signed.
http://www.openspf.org/Introduction
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