Hannah Schroeter wrote:
About 75% of the SPF records in the .com TLD end in -all. I would say
that it is the current practice, although certainly not the
universally adopted practice.
Have I missed something (specifically, a solution for that already in
widespread implementation and deployment) or do they just ignore the
forwarding problem?
A vast majority (the common man) has no forwarding set up at all.
A very small percentage are taking a stand that forwarders should take
responsibility for the return path of email.
A decent percent of people don't understand -all.
The fact that the people that don't understand -all converses with the
vast majority that are completely uneffected by forwarding means that
-all works well for them.
A way to avoid the problem is to send email to people's final
destination email address, not one that is going to forward and to not
send mails to mailing lists. Obviously this is an insane restriction
for people -- however, the "typical Internet user" doesn't send mails to
mailing lists and talks one-to-one to their friends who provide them
with an email address that doesn't forward.
The "problems" with SPF -all clearly effect the technical community more
than the non-technical community. And the technical community has the
ability to fix it by deploying things like SRS.
--
// Theo Schlossnagle
// Principal Engineer -- http://www.omniti.com/~jesus/
// Postal Engine -- http://www.postalengine.com/
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