From: Mark Holm [mailto:mdholm(_at_)telerama(_dot_)com]
Sent: 17 June 2006 16:35
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"
On reflection I realise that my assertion is probably an over statement
given that our record currrently ends in ~all. So thanks for challenging the
accuracy of this statement and my apologies if this has served to confuse
the issue for anyone or undermine the basis of my argument, which remains
unchanged.
Put simply - The IP addresses from which these e-mails were rejected were in
the ? Part of the record which returns a Neutral result. The ISP that
offered to let us test our e-mail against their own SPF checks also rejected
them on the basis of a Neutral result. Both were prepared to accept mail
from a domain with no SPF record at all. What message does this send out to
domain owners on shared mail/web servers who are not in a position to
publish a more assertive SPF record and how is this compatible with the
principal of treating Neutral results and no SPF records equally?
The ISP that offered us the opportunity to test our mail against their own
SPF checks simply confirmed to us that some Internet/Mail service providers
would accept nothing less than a SPF Pass. They, at least were receptive to
our argument that despite it's limitations, e-mail from our domain with a
Neutral SPF result was better for them and their users than e-mail from our
domain with no SPF record at all. Furthermore they have agreed to review and
modify their settings. This was a generous offer from an ISP that we had
never sent mail to and therefore had no particular incentive beyond a
willingness to help us and ensure that their own implementation of SPF was
not inadvertently blocking legitimate mail to their own users.
Interia.pl/Poczta.fm are a different story altogether.
I have absolutely no idea how Interia.pl/Poczta.fm obtained a Softfail
result - there was no link to the SPF help page to give us a breakdown of
how they arrived at this result and we could not replicate the same results
using any of the tools available on the SPF web site. We had absolutely no
reason to doubt our record - we did this to show them the evidence in the
hope that they would engage in some dialogue with us to resolve this issue -
they excercised their right not to do so. We eventually had to accept that
and move on.
There were no forwarding issues - all e-mails were being sent directly to
their users, not via an intermediary domain. Whatever internal forwaring
arrangements exist between interia.pl and poczta.fm is for them to factor
into their SPF checking mechanism, not for senders to guess at. According to
dsnreport.com they only appear to have one mx record each. At present
interia.pl does not accept mail to their abuse address. Poczta.fm does not
accept mail to their abuse or postmaster addresses. From our own
observation, these results appeat to be fairly consistent. I leave you to
make your own judgements on that.
Unfortunately they enjoy a local market dominance which gives them an unfair
capacity to influence domain owners into surrendering their SPF record out
of comercial necessity, instead of appreciating the real benefits that SPF
publishing affords everyone in the mail cycle.
I hope this is more logical.
Thanks
Claire
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