spf-discuss
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Re: AOL to ESPs: Comply with SPF, Or Else

2004-06-12 02:40:21
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Lørdag den 12. juni 2004 10:06 skrev Tim Meadowcroft:
but Interland flatly refuse to let me add SPF records to
the domains they host for me, and I don't think 1&1 do either (to 
name the 2 biggest shared windows hosting providers)

You can put your DNS records somewhere else - http://www.gratisdns.dk/ 
is a good example of a free DNS hosting service with 5 fast DNS 
servers per domain, where SPF records can be put in easily. You can 
then keep your existing shared hosting provider, just make sure that 
the DNS provider has identical DNS records (except for the TXT 
record, of course).

I work for a big shared hosting provider, and as far as I see it, the 
providers have many ways they can use SPF:

1) Make the customer decide how the SPF record should look like.
2) Use SPF to enforce, that outgoing e-mails must pass through the 
provider's servers. This can be used to create low-cost hosting 
products, because people are willing to pay extra to be able to 
modify the default SPF records.

In our case, our plan is to introduce the "v=spf1 mx ?all" record as 
default for all our domains, and then let the user be able to modify 
it if they know how to do it. Our outgoing mail server requires 
authentication, and many users might find it beneficial to use 
"v=spf1 mx -all" instead.

- there are a 
lot of small domains out there who don't control their DNS records
except thru web control panels.

There are a lot of control panel programmers / vendors who are 
currently working on implementing SPF records/TXT records.

And we don't have sufficient weight 
to influence these big hosting companies.

Yes we do. The big hosting companies are very interested in SPF, they 
just want to be 100% sure that they do the right things before doing 
it. Giving a feature to 100000 users and then remove it later because 
it was a wrong decision can potentially give 100000 angry users.

"Vote with your feet" 
only works when you can go somewhere that DOES support SPF.

Yup. The third largest bank here in Denmark was suddenly the 
absolutely dominated internet bank. Why? Because people actually 
moved their bank accounts to this bank in order to get their 
Homebanking system, which was easy, fast, computer independent and OS 
independent. They had double as high a ratio of internetbank 
users/total customers than the largest bank.

Lars.

- -- 

Dybdahl Engineering
Tlf.: 70201241 (08:00-17:30)
Fax.: 70201242
Mobil: 20331241
http://dybdahl.dk/
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