spf-discuss
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: AOL to ESPs: Comply with SPF, Or Else

2004-06-12 05:07:12
On Saturday 12 June 2004 17:01, Tim Meadowcroft wrote:

The people we have to convince are the hosting providers, and the way to
convince them is to point out the bandwidth they could save by a reduction
in bounces due to joe-jobs on the thousands of little domains they service,
and then hope that "SPF Support" becomes a headline "tick-in-the-box"
feature.

My guess is about 80% of hosting providers don't know about SPF, or maybe they 
know but lack the skills to implement it. Even for the rest that already know 
SPF and has the skill to implement it, they won't be able to do that because 
they mostly rely on third party automation tools.

I'm taking numbers out of the air right now, but maybe about 99.9% of hosting 
providers (i.e. almost all of them) use third party automation tools. The big 
three of automation tools ('control panel' in hosting lingo) are: cpanel 
(http://cpanel.net), ensim (http://www.ensim.com) and plesk 
(http://www.plesk.com). The 0.01% skilled enough to develop their own control 
panel probably already know how to implement SPF.

Instead of hosting providers, we need to approach the makers of these 'hosting 
control panel'. If they are convinced to implement SPF, we'll see maybe about 
20-30 million domains with SPF record in less than 6 months, that should be 
enough critical mass before the rest of the world will embrace SPF. I think 
20-30 million of small domains will make a lot bigger impact than a single 
aol.com trying to convince the rest of the world single handedly.