On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:55:41AM +1000, Chris Drake wrote:
MWW> On the plus side, publishing SPF will help their mail get
MWW> past other spam filtersr, which are a source of false
MWW> positives on their own.
... except for anyone using Baysian filters (eg: Netscape / Mozilla /
Thunderbird MUAs), where the SPF headers will direct the email to the
junk folder...
It's a bit more subtle than that, and I think you know that. It's not
the spf headers that trigger the bayesian filter, it's the softfails and
neutrals, IN COMBINATION WITH a large amount of prior spam with
softfails and neutrals.
Oh yeah - and everyone who uses a forwarding service, or a ".forward"
unix file etc, who simply won't get their emails in the first place...
Again, it's a bit more subtle than that. Only people who check spf will
get the mail rejected. They need to make provisions, true, whitelist
their forwarders for the mean time (until their providers implement
srs).
We need to be a little more transparent guys: SPF is nice, but it is
not without problems. There's a little bit too much "false
representation" creeping into the whole SPF "pr" thing. Loads of
people inferring that it's going to be good for fighting spam, and
more than a passing number of people suggesting that it's not going to
have false-positive problems (and I've also read anecdotes from people
saying they've "never had even one false positive" which were either
incorrect statements, or were not sufficiently researched that they
should have made the statement in the 1st place).
Well ok, it should be a bit clearer what problems should be anticipated,
and how to solve these problems. Because all of these problems can be
solved.
Koen
--
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
Networking, embedded systems, unix expertise, artificial intelligence.
Public PGP key: http://www.metro.cx/pubkey-gmc.asc
Wondering about the funny attachment your mail program
can't read? Visit http://www.openpgp.org/
-------
Sender Policy Framework: http://spf.pobox.com/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
Send us money! http://spf.pobox.com/donations.html
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
pgpkBEgLUVBGC.pgp
Description: PGP signature