On 23/10/2011 17:09, Steve Atkins wrote:
On Oct 23, 2011, at 7:39 AM, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
On 21/Oct/11 19:07, 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.
Wasn't it supposed to mean "reject"? IIRC, that was the difference
between setting -all (as irtf.org does) rather than ~all or ?all.
That's what it's proponents used to claim, yes. But it's unfixably broken for
that purpose. The only reason you don't see serious mail problems for
anyone unwise enough to use -all is that almost nobody pays much attention
to SPF for rejecting email.
How is it 'unfixably' broken? Just interested.
it seems to me that the only reason it's 'unfixably broken' is that
people are using it without really understanding what it's doing. If all
MTAs rejected all mail that failed SPF checks, then they'd soon get the
problems fixed. Remote users having to relay via a specified submission
server is a trivial problem to fix (AFAICS), and incorrectly specified
SPF records (as in the BT/MS case) deserve to cause messages to be
blocked (IMHO)
(SPF is certainly not that useful as an 'anti-spam' mechanism, but it
seems to have the potential to work reasonably well as an anti-spoofing
mechanism, which makes it considerably harder for many spammers)
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