On Saturday 22 November 2003 4:18 pm, Philip Gladstone wrote:
p.s. My ISP does not permit outbound port 25 connections except to their
mail server. This means that I would not be able to do SPF checking if
the only option was the ESMTP extension. I would have to rely on their
Agreed this is another downside to the ESMTP approach. Sorry I had not
considered it as my ISP does not block anything. Indeed I would not be happy
with an ISP that had such restrictions and it is sad that the one I use has
gotten a lot of accusations of being 'spam-friendly' simply as a result of
treating their customers with trust and respect... <sigh> a trust which has
been abused by some with depressing predictability.
I am really hoping the SPF effort will put an end to this destructive witch
hunt, and help solve the problem by cooperative, distributed means and
without recourse to authoritatrian measures. I read today that the US
congress is planning some dumb law to curb spam, which is stupid because it's
a purely technical problem, all due to a design-requirements mismatch between
the ancient SMTP, designed for an internet of socially-responsible
interlinked institutions, and the post-1994 internet of, well, chaos really
(or discordian utopia, take your pick). <rant over, takes another drink>
It would also mean that if my
machine at home (which is my mail server) goes down (or my ISP cuts me
off), then I would not be able to *send* mail via another path. With
regular SPF, I could change my DNS record (hosted by zoneedit) and then
send mail from anywhere.
SMTP is designed to cope well with unreliable connectivity, more so than DNS.
In the event of an outage a 4xx-series temporary failure code will be
generated and mail will be queued until the problem is resolved (or a
timeout, typically several days, has passed).
If you were running your DNS server at home with an unreliable connection,
your problems would be much worse...
I find it interesting that you will use third-party DNS but not third-party
mail servers. Is it for privacy? Or maybe you don't like polling for new
mail? Or is it because you don't like their filter policy? If the answer is
that last one, maybe in a post-SPF world things would be different?
-------
Sender Permitted From: http://spf.pobox.com/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
Latest draft at http://spf.pobox.com/draft-mengwong-spf-02.6.txt
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname(_at_)©#«Mo\¯HÝÜîU;±¤Ö¤Íµø?¡