Have you received spam from an @psychognenic.com address?

We, at psychogenic, really hate unsolicited commercial email--better know as spam.

Perhaps it is because we've spoken out on this unprofessional conduct, and the often despicable behavior spammers adopt, or perhaps it is just a normal part of business for these people--the fact remains that the psychogenic.com domain is being used by one or more mass-marketers in a vain attempt to disguise the crap they want to send you as legitimate mail from us.

Up until recently, there was nothing we could do to stop anyone who felt like it from sending you viagra commercials in an email from theCEOisaspammer@psychogenic.com or any other address. But this is changing... it is now possible to automatically trash any and all fake emails that appear to come from our domain automatically, using a system called SPF (Sender Policy Framework).

We here, like thousands of other domains such as America Online (AOL) and Google, are providing all the information required for mail servers around the world to tell instantly between real mail and the forgeries behind which spammers always hide.

But, if you've received a SPAM that has our address listed, this means that your service provider has not yet enabled SPF forgery filtering. Let your ISP or provider know you are tired of receiving spam and ask them to setup SPF in their Mail Transfer Agent. Direct them to the SPF home at http://spf.pobox.com/ or even to this page if they have any questions. We'll be glad to help them put an end to spam :)

A few technical notes

Adding SPF support to your domain is a snap! Everything required to have a functional SPF-compliant site is already running if you have a domain name. That's because SPF uses a regular DNS TEXT record to publically document the list of machines from which email may originate for your domain.

If you have a look at the TXT records for SPF-enabled domains, you will see entries like these:

$ host -t txt psychogenic.com
psychogenic.com text "v=spf1 a mx a:gw.psychogenic.com -all"

$ host -t txt aol.com
aol.com text "v=spf1 ip4:152.163.225.0/24 ip4:205.188.139.0/24 
		ip4:205.188.144.0/24 ip4:205.188.156.0/23 
		ip4:205.188.159.0/24 ip4:64.12.136.0/23 
		ip4:64.12.138.0/24 ptr:mx.aol.com ?all"

As you can see, the entry for the psychogenic.com domain is rather simple. It states that mail for psychogenic can only emanate from the psychogenic.com (the "A" record) host, the psychogenic.com mail exchanger (the "MX" record) and one additional machine, gw.psychogenic.com. The -all option tells others to reject mail appearing to come from psychogenic.com arriving from anywhere else.

The aol.com entry is more complex, and includes ranges of IP addresses as well as other records. Creating your own SPF TXT entry is easy -- you don't even need to read a tutorial. Simply use the SPF record generator wizard at http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html. Enter your domain name at the top, click begin and fill in the fields. Once you have your own "v=spf1 ..." string, add it (or have your DNS admin add it) to your domain's DNS record and you are done !