Hi Meng,
Yikes - sorry - I apologize - I hit "reply" before reading the next
bit (in a bad mood after reading on some news site recently someone
saying SPF causes no false positives...)
There are still some incorrect statements that follow, and there
needs to be a distinction made between "false positives" (emails
hitting recipient spam folders without senders knowledge) and
"SPF bounces" (emails being bounced/returned-to-sender due to properly
applies SPF rules. The latter, although irritating, is better -
because the sender knows the email didn't go through, and knows how to
correct the problem - and this is exactly what SPF was built for, was
it not?
I disagree that the "middle ground" should be ~all - this is what the
baysian filters classify as spam immediately. At least "-all" tells
the sender what screwed up, and where.
A Bayesian filter chooses to ignore that "MUST".
Who is at fault, the SPF specification, or the Bayesian filters?
We are. Bayesian was here first, 4% of the world use "Netscape", so us
recommending ~all and choosing to ignore the fact that those filters
auto-spam-classify SPF headers means we're arrogantly throwing the
legit emails of SPF users into the trash cans of 4% of their
recipients (certainly ones using non compliant forwarding, maybe
others too depending on how their filter learned), without telling the
senders.
There's other ways to fix this - maybe "MUST IGNORE" could easily be
accomplished by not shoving the headers in at all, until such time as
the bayesian folks update their filters and a reasonable majority of
their customers apply the update?
If there's not already a link on the "why did it fail" spf site
telling people using ".forward" or other forwarders how to comply, one
should be set up. I can probably modify my SPF tester so that it can
accept a "forwarded bounce", parse it, and warn bounced recipients
that they need to fix their forwarding service too, if that's helpful
for senders.
Kind Regards,
Chris Drake
Thursday, July 15, 2004, 10:29:55 AM, you wrote:
MWW> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:55:41AM +1000, Chris Drake wrote:
MWW> |
MWW> | "Be nice to people" includes "be honest".
MWW> |
MWW> You get the honesty if you keep reading a few paragraphs
MWW> down in my original message.
MWW> -------
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