spf-discuss
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Re: specification 02.9.7 released

2004-02-08 15:17:00
   Clients are NOT REQUIRED to fall back to parent domains.  If a domain
   has no SPF record, clients MUST NOT, on their own initiative,
   substitute SPF data from a parent domain.  For example, if no SPF
   record is found for "workstation.example.com", clients MUST NOT
   proceed automatically to query "example.com".

I just started implementing SPF, and generally am agreeable with it, but this is the one where I see a huge whole.

1) Which is it, NOT REQUIRED, meaning not mandatory but allowable, or MUST NOT, meaning not allowable? From reading the SPF web site and other document, I'm inclined to believe the meaning is MUST NOT, which brings me to point 2.

2) Many domains publish a wildcard record for the domain, so that typos in urls still work. For instace all of the same work:

http://www.britneyspears.com/
http://wwww.britneyspears.com/
http://ww.britneyspears.com/

Thus, there are an infinite number of subdomains of britneyspears.com. But there is no way in SPF to indicate that they guidance I publish in an SPF/TXT record applies to all subdomains as well as my master domains. So if I protect britneyspears.com with the following:

britneyspears.com. 1H IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:216.166.80.0/24 -all"

All the smarter spammer needs to do is send mail from joe(_at_)foo(_dot_)britneyspears(_dot_)com, and SPF will return an evaluation of None instead of Fail.

Am I missing something here?

--
K2 // Karl Kraft  // karl(_at_)nfox(_dot_)com
To purchase it is not like spending money, but rather it is an investment in the future, in a blow against the empire


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