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

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:38:22PM +1100, Chris Drake wrote:

| Hi Alex,
| 
| No - you misunderstand - the recipient ISP follows the policy of the
| ISP identified in the envelope; this is not me (and it may or may not
| even be my own ISP), and they may or (usually) may not list me in
| their SPF system (especially not as I run my own outgoing mail server,
| but I digress).

There is no legal risk to YOU because of this.  If the customer of the
ISP (and your customer, too, presumably) does not want this to happen
for his remailer service, he can ask his ISP to change it so either they
stop using SPF entirely (they have that option) or make an exception for
the mail servers of your service.  If his ISP does not want to do that,
then he can either change to another ISP that will (there are tens of
thousands on the net he can use as a mail provider even through the same
access provider).  Or he can start his own ISP and do it the way he likes
and make money while doing it (provided there is a market for this need
as your rant seems to suggest).


| It is not "I" who block mail from others - its my ISP - and it is
| beyond my control whether or not they do this, which is why I hate SPF
| so much!  I cannot afford ever to loose even just 1 email.  Why is
| this so hard for everyone to understand?

I thought YOU ran your own mail servers.  But now you say YOUR ISP is
blocking YOUR mail from going out?  If you have legitimate mail servers
they should be able to make direct connections and it should not be an
issue with your ISP as long as you are not a spammer.


| I can NEVER afford to loose ANY emails.

Neither can anyone else.  Do you have any idea how much mail has been LOST
because of the spam problem?  I *HAVE* lost mail due to it, including some
that resulted in lost business and lost money because of it.


| I can NEVER afford for my sent emails to get trashed without my
| knowledge.

If your customer refuses to accept the mail, or uses a service that refuses
to accept the mail, it is not you would is to blame for that.  Your customer
might be unhappy, and surely you want to make him happy.  But if his ISP
did the refusal, the customer needs to be fully aware of that and he needs
to find the contingency.

And there are technical solutions, such as making the mail available by
means other than SMTP redelivery.  For example I see that some remailers
are offering web access, IMAP and/or POP access, and other means.


| Please re-read those last 2 sentences before replying.

I can NEVER afford to allow spammers to trash my network and computing
resources.  SPF *WILL* be saving me a lot of money, and allow me to
provide better services and lower costs to my customers.


| My remarks are not foolish - your assumption that everyone runs their
| own mail server and therefore can easily add SPF records, and can
| easily get all recipients to add SPF records for them is the foolish
| remark here!

Your remarks indicate you are not open minded about change, and that you
are not taking the opportunity to explore all new business models BEFORE
your competitors do.  I suggest you start finding MORE SECURE ways to let
your customers get their email.  SMTP has ALWAYS had some degree of
reliability problem, and always will, so it has never been 100%.  Other
means like IMAP pickup are more reliable because the client programs that
do so won't delete any mail until it is stored on the receiving machine.

-- 
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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