I have been lurking for a couple of weeks now, have implemented an SPF record
for my domain and started SPF testing on the inbound mailserver. Yet one
thing is not clear to me and that's the difference between "softfail" and
"neutral" (yes, I did look at the draft specification, but it's still not
clear).
I understand that there needs to be something in between "pass" and "fail".
But why two? Judging from the SPF tests over the past three weeks, it looks
there is virtually no difference between clients which fall in the "softfail"
and "neutral" categories. Almost without exception (a couple of legitimate
"softfail") all of it was spam. What's the point of making a difference
between a "~all" and "?all" at the end of your SPF record?
Supposedly a message from a client with a "softfail" status is subject to
additional filtering, but with Aol and Amazon publishing "?all" at the end of
their records, I see no point in ignoring the "neutral" replies. To be
honest, to me a "neutral" is even worse than "softfail" since apparently the
domain owner is not even working on a solution where he may end up with a
"-all".
For instance, at this very moment, SpamAssassin-3.0.0-pre2 is not even
considering the "neutral" reply although it awards "softfail" some points.
Experience shows that spammers quickly pick this up, so this will provide
quite a loophole around it.
Regards,
Arjen
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