On Wed, 3 Aug 2005, Florian Weimer wrote:
* Stuart D. Gathman:
On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, wayne wrote:
At about the same time, Earthlink equally quietly removed the SPF
records they'd been publishing for at least a year. That was
particularly surprising because SPF originator Meng Wong had been
working with Earthlink to get their SPF set up. If Meng can't make
SPF work, who can?
Yeah, and when they removed their records, my mail started bouncing
because I was including earthlink.net so my Dad's email would pass.
Can you tell us if it bounced immediately, or after a couple of days?
Such inconsistencies can easily be caused by regular DNS updates
(because of the propagation delay etc.), and they should result in
temporary failures at the SMTP level (not 5xx errors).
They bounced immediately. With a PermError. Because there was
no longer an SPF record for earthlink.net. No problem - I got
the bounce with the very clear diagnostic, checked that sure enough, the
reciever was correct (my own system :-) and there was no longer an SPF record
for earthlink. So I changed the SPF record and set up the VPN.
SPF is great - even with earthlink at (or abandoning) the wheel.
I suspect they simply didn't want to deal with telling users
that they can't use their foo(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net address from any
random email mail client in world with no set up. Since they
offer webmail, I don't see the problem with non-technical users just
using that when they are abroad.
--
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.