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Re: [spf-discuss] solving the forwarding problem

2005-09-11 05:01:40
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Dick St.Peters wrote:
As for forwarding to the cable internet service, getting them to
whitelist a small competitor is vastly less likely than getting them
to give a customer a PTR record, and we know how unlikely that is.  So
forget all this nonsense about recipients whitelisting forwarders.
For the overwhelming majority of recipients it just ain't gonna
happen.

Then SPF isn't for them.

In the real world, most of the advice here on how to overcome various
problems with SPF essentially comes down to "Don't use SPF", which is
strange for group of supposed SPF advocates.

Strange it may occur to you, but that's how it is.  SPF is about domain 
owners defining who (which IP addresses) may send mail on their behalf, 
and the kind of forwarding you describe (i.e. where the recipient did not 
instruct or does not even know about the forwarding) is about using 
someone else's identity when sending mail without their approval.  Those 
two concepts are fundamentally incompatible.

And, tell you what: if this kind of forwarding is allowed to persist, then 
every real address forger can just claim to be a forwarder and happily go 
on with his dirty business, because there's just no technical means to 
distinguish between honest forwarding and dirty address forgery.  The 
only means to do that is for recipients to explicitly declare trust 
relationships with their forwarders to their proxy receivers (AKA ISPs).

Feel free not to participate in SPF if you don't follow this logic.
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