Re: return of SOFTFAIL

I do think the softfail is a better thing to have than merely the  
unknown, and fail.  I'm pretty sure of my mailing habits, but wanted to  
make sure.  However, Unknown means that you really just messed up the  
record, in the end.  I think it's effectively equivalent to not having  
the SPF header, in some ways.
What *would* be nice is some way for the domain controller to tell how  
much email from their domain is softfailing.  I don't think it's  
possible, but maybe a message to the user saying the mail went through,  
but that their SysAdmins where not happy with their SMTP server choice.  
 Is it possible with the patches to do a soft bounce, similar to the  
message when you can't reach a machine for 4 hrs?  I think that might  
be the only way to get the info back to the sysadmins.
Obviously the recieving party will have the data of the softfaill.  How  
do we get it back to the domain owners?    Would a soft bounce to the  
original email get the user to talk to the SA?
Ideally, we might be able to get the softbounce to generate a message  
to a standard email address at each site, like spfbounce(_at_)example(_dot_)com,  
if you use the soft fail.   You can choose not to get the emails by not  
using the ~.  If you use +,?, or -, you get no email.
~ should get us the statistics, and more importantly the headers of the  
SMTP servers that are users are using.

(AOL might not do it, but it might be useful to some of the rest of us,  
to test the whole system out.  Getting AOL would be amazing :-)

So, who has comments for the neophyte on SPF?  I've been hearing about  
SPF since LISA (SAGE).  It's nice to see it really taking off.  Does  
any of what I've said really make sense?

Matthew

 --------------------------------
Matthew Barr
mbarr(_at_)datalyte(_dot_)com
Managing Partner
Datalyte Consulting, LLC.
(646) 765-6878    (cell)
On Jan 27, 2004, at 8:11 PM, Meng Weng Wong wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 12:47:56AM +0000, Dan Boresjo wrote:
> | On Tuesday 27 January 2004 11:07 pm, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
> | > I'm going to bring back "softfail" so people don't have to choose
> | > between "?" and "-" --- "~" will be a happy medium.
> |
> | As the spec is supposed to be frozen, I hope you are referring to  
> SPF2?
> No, I'm afraid this is a change for spfv1.  It's a very minor change
> though with very big results.  I want to put SOFTFAIL back in for the
> following reasons:
>
> 1) I took it out too hastily when Eric Allman questioned its value.
>
> 2) If we put it back in, people won't have to choose between "unknown"
>    and "fail".
>
> 3) AOL will be able to change their record to ~all.
>
> 4) We'll then be able to gather much better statistics on expected  
> false
>    positives and so on.
>
> 5) It lets domains smoothly switch from ? to - by stopping at ~ along
>    the way.
>
> 6) Wayne talked me into it.
>
> SOFTFAIL means a receiver MTA should still accept the message, but  
> apply
> a higher level of skepticism or a higher transaction cost: it should
> content-filter it more strongly or (in a universe where hashcash is
> available) the receiver MTA could ask the sender to compute some sort  
> of
> hashcash.
>
> This change will be backward compatible to all existing published  
> domains.
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