Re: Lawsuits, angry business users, and SPF stupidity.

Chris Drake wrote:
> The only difference here is that unlike cars and horses in real life,
> the cars and horses in our email world are both just as good as each
> other, and your SPF idea is proposing to kill all the horses,
If SMTP horse and SMTP+SPF is a car, then yes replacing SMTP with 
SMTP+SPF is a good thing and will probably be a stepping stone to 
something better, maybe an Advanced Mail Transfer Protocol (AMTP).
SMTP is a child that trusts everyone, but now sees that not everyone is 
who they claim to be. SMTP has to grow up into something different. SPF 
will probably be part of SMTP's adolescense and development into 
something better.
> regardless of whether or not a spammer is riding upon them (and
> incidentally, it lets all the cars go past regardless of whether a
> spammer is driving or not).
Incorrect.

The actual SPF specification makes no judgements. It documents the valid 
origins of email for the owner of a domain. Mail servers that consult 
SPF information and implement company security and rejection policy 
based on that information and/or in combination with other information 
and tests. Some choose to log, some flag, some reject, some swallow 
messages in accordance with their company policy. SPF is not to blame 
for that. Each destination server makes their own choice. Likewise, each 
domain owner makes the choice whether to publish SPF information that 
best reflects their mail traffic.
From what I have read so far of this thread, you are neither the domain 
nor server owner for the email address you use for you business. In 
which case you should be contacting your mail provider and reviewing 
your terms of service with them. You'll probably find they reserve 
certain rights as to how that domain is used, maintained, and protected.
Ultimately, your business should have its own domain and mail servers 
where you have control over its management.
> You should be combatting SPAM with SPF - you should not be combatting
> one small and (if SPF were to be implemented) unlikely aspect that
> some spams may exhibit (and that many non-spams will also exhibit).
As its been said before, I don't think you understand how SPF is used.

> If you hate spam so much, go and get a www.mailblocks.com account. it
> will block all your junk and you'll never miss anything legitimate,
> and nobody else will have to suffer your SPF's collateral damage.
I operate two personal mail servers and manage those of the ISP I work 
for.  At some point I will this year SPF will be supported through out. 
(published records and filtering software).  What you propose with 
mailblocks.com sounds like an individual service. This does not scale 
well when you get into 10's or millions's of mail accounts.
--
Anthony C Howe                                 +33 6 11 89 73 78
http://www.snert.com/       ICQ: 7116561         AIM: Sir Wumpus

"...simplicity is a goal of good design,
                     it is never the starting point." - Dan Geer

-------
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-02.9.4.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?¡