Mimecast's SPFJava Project Initiated

Mimecast announce their initiation and sponsorship of SPFjava (Sender Policy Framework Java), an exciting new opensource development project.

SPF is the first step towards protecting your domain from spoofing (or email sender impersonation). Spoofing makes it easy for any internet user (or software - eg: a virus) to send emails posing as you or your company. Today this is frequently abused in the distribution of viruses, spam, NDR spam, and fraudulent email. Making spoofed emails undeliverable makes many of the ill's of internet email go away.

SPF enables companies to register, as part of their DNS records, which mail server/s are permitted to deliver email for their domain/s. Many thousands of companies have already submitted these records, and an SPF type system is therefore very likely to succeed. An RFC is currently being worked on at http://spf.pobox.com/ to give to the IETF.

The second step in the war against spoofing is where Mimecast and the SPFjava opensource project aims to help. Companies need to configure their mail servers to check SPF records when receiving emails. They must not accept messages for domains which have registered unless the delivering email server matches the registered IP address or SPF tests. SPFjava is a flexible and open java based implementation of the SPF specification (as it evolves). This will be most useful to developers of email servers and applications, administrators of email gateways.

SPFjava once stable (both in code and specification terms) will also be incorporated within the Mimecast message processing framework which converges several gateway based functions (anti-virus, anti-spam, branding, storage, attachment management, sophisticated routing rules) on a unified MTA service and web-based GUI policy management console. Mimecast elegantly resolves, in a single system, many of the problems encountered by email administrators as a result of their systems being connected to the Internet. The Mimecast product incorporates many good opensource technologies including ClamAV, the leading opensource antivirus technology. SPFjava adds nicely to the smart stack of management tools Mimecast already offers.

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact Mimecast.

Notes: SPFJava is a collection of Java classes to test SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records. It is based on the current SPF specifications which can be found at http://spf.pobox.com/ It is currently working for most normal cases. SPF can be downloaded as a JAR to be used at the command line or integrated into an application. The source code is also available in a CVS tree. Sourceforge is currently hosting the project at https://sourceforge.net/projects/spfjava/