Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason.

It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC emails you get that your sendgrid email has been refused because of a bad SPF signature should set in motion some kind of plan to ask if maybe marketing is using them legitimately?

Automated signatures are of limited value but I rarely see rejections based on SPF and DKIM that are a mistake. Things are probably worse for big organizations but as a small email server, technical rejections are usually the right call. The only exception is mailing lists, but the dozens of people who still use those can usually figure out how to add an exception for them.

> Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason

For what it's worth, I've started seeing cybersecurity insurers requiring riders and extra payments if you don't block Russian IPs.

Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server.

Unless you own a global business, i see no reason to even allow other countries access. The potential for attacks is too great, especially from some very specific countries.

I'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut down massively on the folks attacking us.

Lots of companies do this on their websites now using cloud flare or something similar. It’s practical. Still it’s frustrating as a user when you’re traveling over in Europe and can’t access your accounts to pay bills or whatnot.

Next time I travel overseas I'll have a VPN ready.

My bank had some technical problem that prevented access from overseas last time I traveled and I couldn't access my account (which was extremely inconvenient).