As most people know, email is horribly insecure. It is trivial to forge the From address in emails since there is no authentication when sending¹. This means that one cannot trust the From address, and also that people can forge messages from your address. In order to address this a number of new schemes have been developed. These include SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM and SenderID. All of these aim to verify that mail is actually from the address it appears to be from. SPF and SenderID do so by restricting which hosts are allowed to send messages from a certain domain, while DomainKeys and DKIM use cryptographic signatures.

Unfortunately all of these schemes have problems due to the fact that they are an addition to the existing mail system. SPF and SenderID prevent plain forwarding (requiring additional schemes like SRS or whitelisting of forwarders), and MTAs and mailing lists which modify messages break DomainKey and DKIM signatures. Despite these issues, email forgery is an issue which needs to be addressed, and we cannot wait for a perfect solution before adopting it. Some major mail providers (including Gmail and Yahoo) are already implementing these schemes.

I have therefore configured SPF and DKIM in my Postfix mail setup. My SPF policy allows mail from my server and SOFTFAILs all other hosts, and all outgoing mail is signed with DKIM. Incoming mail is checked for SPF and DKIM, but aren't discared even if the checks fail. I will be keeping an eye on things and will revise my policy when I think it safe.

SPF Configuration

To create an SPF policy, add a TXT record to your DNS records according to the SPF syntax. The policy should authorise all hosts from which you send mail. (Mine simply authorises my mail server since I send all mail through it.) You also need a policy for the hostname presented by your mail server in its HELO/EHLO command. You should also create policies for all subdomains which aren't used for mail.

To check SPF records for incoming mail, I used the SPF policy daemon for Postfix. It is packaged for Ubuntu as postfix-policyd-spf-python. Simply follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/postfix-policyd-spf-python/README.Debian², and set defaultSeedOnly = 0 in the configuration file if you don't wish to reject mail which fails the test. Remember to whitelist any servers which forward mail to you (i.e. you have another address which gets forwarded to your mail server), unless they implement SRS³.

DKIM Configuration

To sign and check DKIM I use DKIMproxy. There isn't an Ubuntu package so I installed it from source. The instructions on the site are good, and include details for Postfix. You will need to generate a key to sign with and publish it in DNS, and then configure Postfix to sign outgoing messages and validate incoming messages. DKIMproxy won't discard messages with invalid signatures by default.

DKIM includes a component called ADSP which allows domains to publish their signing policy. The strongest policy states that all messages are signed with DKIM and any messages without signatures should be discarded. This will allow mail servers to reject messages not sent through your mail server. However, the standard is not finalised yet, and issues regarding mailing lists still need to be addressed.