I am not at all surprised that Spammers are using SMTP authentication before most of the legitimate mail movers are even out of the starting blocks. Only a few firms like Santronics Inc. which has one of the industries best anti spam mail servers is up to the task of being able to determine if the spammer that is running authentication is a legitimate service or not.
I am one of the very few people in the entire world that does not have to live with Spam thanks to Santronics.
There are a small handful of companies that understand spam and understand how to stop it, but the political infighting within the standards community has delayed what is essentially a final solution it irritates me to no end. It’s a political quagmire that I hope gets sorted out soon. [Techdirt]