On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 04:02:24PM +0100, Hannah Schroeter wrote:
So snail mail forwarding, in Germany, works exactly like legacy .forward
style email forwarding, no sender rewriting involved!
This is not true.
The letter was never delivered to your old house, delivery did not
complete. In this analogy, the final recipient (MX record) is your
house, not your postoffice.
With .forward style email forwarding, your example would have been:
Postman delivers the letter to your old house. It is accepted.
Someone in the old house relabels the letter and submits it to
the postoffice.
And noone accuses the mail distribution service in Old Town of forgery.
"Dear postman, this letter was delivered to the wrong address. I
have written the new address on the envelope, please accept
responsibility for this message again (free of charge) and have
it delivered to the new address in name of the original sender."
I think you actually may get away with this, once or twice. However,
as soon as this kind of operation is abused, the post service will
not allow it anymore. This compares, somewhat, to SPF.
Alex