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Re: So here it is one year later...

2005-01-31 00:41:04

On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 02:44:27PM -0800, Douglas Otis wrote:
Those publishing SPF records want their mail to go missing?  There is no
means to know which recipient may be using a forwarded account.  There
is no means to prevent a "screw up" with SPF.  Forwarding is a common
practice within colleges, societies, and many providers.  Validating the
legitimacy of an MTA can take place within a single lookup of a small
CSV-CSA record.  A single lookup does not increase the risk to DoS
attacks, and also does not create inadvertent loss of mail, as does
SPF.  

The forwarding problem is known and information is on spf.pobox.com
(which still is the primary source for information about spf). It's not
like it is 'the big secret of spf' that there is a forwarding issue. I 
suppose people read this site before publishing, so they must know
about the forwarding problem. However, people still publish. I'm not
going to guess at the motivations of these people, i'm not a pyschologist.
Fact is that despite the forwarding issue, people do publish. 

I can only elaborate a bit on my own motivations: if a message is
forwarded and then bounces because of spf, the bounce will contain the
actual email address to which the message was forwarded. I can resend,
perhaps attaching a small note about the fact that the forwarding did
not work. I have never had serious problems with this issue.

Koen

-- 
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
Networking, embedded systems, unix expertise, artificial intelligence.
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