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Claire, thanks for sharing your experiences with us!
Claire Campbell wrote:
Our SPF record was published with the invaluable assistance of a member
of your volunteer support team after we hit problems with the one that
had been published for us, which was incomplete and contained syntax
errors.
Hear, hear! I'm sure the support team loves to hear this. I'll forward it
to them.
(By the way, thank you also for your recent testimonial, which we have
published on our website: <http://new.openspf.org/Community/News>)
However, as soon as [our SPF] record was published a Mail Service
Provider in Poland, Interia.pl and Poczta.fm started rejecting mail from
our authorised mail servers with the following:
Recipient address rejected: SPF policy: SOFTFAIL [ wyslij ten list przez
wlasciwy dla Twojejdomeny serwer pocztowy / please send this message
through an authorized mailserver].
Good to know it is Interia.pl and Poczta.fm (are they affiliated?). I have
heard about such problems with Polish ISPs before but nothing as specific
as this.
Why did it say "SOFTFAIL"? I assume you are aware that SoftFail (~) is
different from Neutral (?).
[...]
We tried asking users that were affected by this to contact their
provider [about this ...]
[...]
More recently we have moved to a different mail service provider, which
enabled us, for the first time, to obtain a SPF Pass and we therefore
made a final attempt to contact them from our own domain. When this was
ignored, we decided to call it a day - apart from the fact that it was
not achieving anything, we objected on principal to making our new
service provider pick up the tab for resending mail to their users.
Even though you didn't succeed I think you took exactly the right route in
trying to get the issue resolved, especially with regard to you first
asking users to contact their ISP and then your final decision to just let
things rest. In situations like yours it is important not to surrender to
the stupidity of your users' ISPs, but instead to make it very clear to
your users that it is their ISPs who are degrading their quality of
service through incorrect implementation of technical standards.
[...] Nevertheless, Interia.pl is operated by a popular local radio
station and in 2005, was the 4th largest mail service provider in Poland
- this market dominance therefore means that they have a greater
responsibility to get it right.
Agreed.
When it was suggested that this e-mail rejection might be due to "local
policy" abusing SPF, another ISP in Poland invited us to test our e-mail
against their own "strict" SPF checks. These were also rejected on the
basis of a Neutral SPF result. However, mail sent from an address
without an SPF record was delivered successfully.
And this other ISP in Poland wasn't responsive either?
In all the non-technical documentation I have read on SPF, I can find no
recommendation to reject mail on the basis of a neutral SPF result but
rather to treat it as if it had no SPF record. Logically, therefore, any
Internet/Mail Service provider that chooses to reject mail on the basis
of a neutral SPF result should also reject mail from domains with no SPF
record. To do otherwise can only serve to penalise responsible domain
owners who are at least aware of the problem + making the effort to
become part of the solution.
Your analysis is absolutely correct.
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