Perhaps I misunderstand, but I think I detect some incorrect logic in
this thread.
If Claire published a record with Neutral as the default (?all), how can
she say that the value lies "in the millions of other IP's that are
explicitly excluded from doing so"
If she published ?all, she is clearly not excluding other IP addresses.
She is indicating they should be treated as if they had no SPF record.
That is a very different statement.
Also, how can she say:
"Although this was less assertive than we would have liked for mail
delivery purposes, it was based on an honest assessment of our
infrastructure and we were not prepared to indulge in deceit simply to
give it the convenience of a SPF Pass."
I am assuming her SPF record looks something like
v=spf1 +(mechanisms that resolve to authorised servers for her domain) ?all
This record would give an explicit Pass for any authorised server and
Neutral for the whole world of other servers. I think this is the
inverse of what Claire's message says. Perhaps part of Claire's trouble
is misunderstanding expectations?
Now, if the problem ISP's are rejecting mail from servers in the + part
of the record, (this is what Claire's message states) then they really
do have a serious configuration error. If they are seeing the mail as
coming from a server in the ? part of the record, when it in fact
originated from a server in the + part of the record, then perhaps there
is a forwarding problem (possibly internal to the problem ISP), or
perhaps their SPF checker is just broken.
The discussion of Claires message seems to assume that the rejected mail
was correctly assigned to the ? category and then a questionable policy
was applied, but that is not what Claires message actually said.
Not to be too pedantic, but this is Boolean logic. If you don't get
your truth table constructed properly, you will not understand what is
going on.
--
Mark Holm
mdholm(_at_)telerama(_dot_)com
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