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Re: [Asrg] Microsoft takes over British Telecom

2011-10-21 12:28:51

On Oct 21, 2011, at 10:19 AM, David Romerstein wrote:

On 10/21/2011 1:07 PM, Steve Atkins wrote:
The bigger issue is that you shouldn't care about SPF failing. An SPF pass
provides somewhat useful data, an SPF fail means absolutely nothing.

That is not ENTIRELY true. Under the proper circumstances, an SPF failure 
should indicate that NDRs should not be sent to the purported 'Reply-To' or 
'Return-Path' addresses.

Yes.

But if you remove the negative in that statement you end up with something like 
"Under the proper circumstances, an SPF pass should indicate that NDRs should 
be sent to the return-path address". :)

(Neither says what you should do with an SPF neutral response, but that's a 
whole other can of worms).

But, yes, in an "is this spam or not" sense, SPF fail means nothing.


Yup. An SPF pass (or a DKIM pass) is a positive assertion - it means something 
solid and well defined.  An SPF or DKIM failure can be for any number of 
unrelated reasons, so it doesn't mean anything in particular.

Cheers,
  Steve

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