On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
But they are your customer, and they expect *you* to work around it.
So you have to implement SRS to work around it. SRS is easy. I'm
sure you know that and are just worried about broken mailing lists and such.
I just had an insight on what the real problem is with your scenario.
On at least three occasions, I have had users opt out of their in house content
spam filtering (pydspam). A few weeks later, nobody at their company
can send mail to AOL! Why? Well, it seems these users opted out because
they prefered the AOL mail program. They had set up the vacation forward
and left it on permanently. All the spam sent to their account was
dutifully resent to AOL - where they would mark it as spam in the AOL
mail interface. AOL thus learns that their company's IP address is a
spam source, and blocks it (fortunately with a decay time of about
2 days). If AOL was checking SPF, and learned domains as spam sources,
SRS would ensure that their company's domain was blocked.
Why did these users do this? They didn't really want an aol.com email
address, they wanted the AOL mail application. Many companies offer a mailbox
service where you can relay mail to their imap/pop/webmail server from
any domain (after configuring which IPs you will relay the mail from
and what your outgoing domain should be). Often, only the domain
is configured, and they accept relays from any MX for the domain
(and you can make their server the primary MX).
If AOL mail supported such a feature, the user would have exactly what
they wanted. The problem is that users are trying to use these
dubious "forwards" to turn AOL or hotmail into something they are not -
a mailbox service for an arbitrary domain.
Real mailbox services are very cheap, though not free, (I think I recall
domainsmadeeasy.com is $15/yr per mailbox). It would give the user what they
really want (unless it is the AOL user interface itself that is floating
their boat). And you wouldn't have to mess with SRS.
You could also install an inhouse imap server for them.
--
Stuart D. Gathman <stuart(_at_)bmsi(_dot_)com>
Business Management Systems Inc. Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.