Sender ID

Sender ID is an anti-spoofing proposal from the former MARID IETF working group that tried to join Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Caller ID. Sender ID is defined primarily in Experimental RFC 4406, but there are additional parts in RFC 4405, RFC 4407 and RFC 4408.

Sender ID is heavily based on SPF, with only a few additions. These differences are discussed here.

Sender ID tries to improve on a principal deficiency in SPF: that SPF does not verify the header addresses that indicates the sending party. Such header addresses are typically displayed to the user and are used to reply to emails. Indeed, such header addresses can be different from the address that SPF tries to verify; that is, SPF verifies only the "MAIL FROM" address, also called the envelope sender.

However, there are many similar email header fields that all contain sending party information; therefore Sender ID defines in RFC 4407 a Purported Responsible Address (PRA) as well as a set of heuristic rules to establish this address from the many typical headers in an email.

Syntactically, Sender ID is almost identical to SPF except that v=spf1 is replaced with one of:

The only other syntactical difference is that Sender ID offers the feature of positional modifiers not supported in SPF. In practice, so far no positional modifier has been specified in any Sender ID implementation.

In practice, the pra scheme usually only offers protection when the email is legitimate, while offering no real protection in the case of spam or phishing. The pra for most legitimate email will be either the familiar From: header field, or, in the case of mailing lists, the Sender: header field. In the case of phishing or spam, however, the pra may be based on Resent-* header fields that are often not displayed to the user. To be an effective anti-phishing tool, the MUA (Mail User Agent or Mail Client) will need to be modified to display either the pra for Sender ID, or the Return-Path: header field for SPF.

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