On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 05:49, Koen Martens wrote:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 12:06:35PM +1000, Chris Drake wrote:
I've lost at *least* 5 emails that I know of in the last 14 days, all
apparently destroyed by SPF filters WITHOUT ANY WARNING TO ME.
This can not be the case. SPF filters either accept or bounce messages,
they do not destroy.
What is happening to Chris is that his emails get a "neutral" result
from SPF checks as a result of the "?all" in the pobox.com SPF record.
In theory, this should be treated the same as a "none" result. However,
in a scoring-based scheme, mail purportedly coming from a domain that
has published SPF records but not getting a "pass" is considerably more
likely to be spam than mail coming from a domain that has not published
SPF records at all. This shouldn't be enough to cause the mail to be
junked on its own, but if there are other spam-signs in the message then
it could be sufficient to trigger an end-user spam filter (e.g. a
Bayesian filter). Such filters generally result in the message being
filed in the recipient's trash folder without any notification being
sent to the purported originator.
As one of the people that was trashing some of Chris' mail, I can vouch
that this is indeed happening (although since I do scan through my junk
mail manually, I was able to discover what was going on and fix it, so
Chris' mail to me was delayed rather than destroyed). This sort of thing
*must* be happening elsewhere too though.
Paul.
--
Paul Howarth <paul(_at_)city-fan(_dot_)org>