Michael Deutschmann wrote on Monday, January 15, 2007 5:36 PM -0600:
Also, note that not all forwarders are the same. In cases such as
yours, you're getting paid, so you put the recipient's desires for
simple configuration first. In many other cases, forwarding is
offered as a take-it-or-leave-it gift, and the forwarder's desire
to avoid backscatter will dominate.
The present method of forwarding has been in place for a long time. It
was formulated at a time when the internet was cooperative and forging
an identity in order to trick a user into reading a message was an
unusual corner case. The idea was that recipients could set up their
mailboxes to remail incoming messages to another account, but retaining
the original return-path so the *sender* would see DSN's for subsequent
delivery problems, even though the recipient's MTA accepted delivery of
the message. This convenient short-cut perhaps made sense when forgery
to hide network abuse was unusual, no one cared if a DSN for a failed
forwarding hop resulted in the original sender learning where a
recipient's mail was forwarded, senders didn't use fraudulent
return-paths and there was no spam to forward. It was certainly *not*
proposed as a way for non-technical end users to make permanent address
changes without informing their correspondents.
That's all water under the bridge. SPF has an interest in forwarding
because it is widely used, though very problematic. It has been an
important goal from the outset that SPF not impede existing forwarding
arrangements *more than they already are*. That latter caveat is
important. Forwarding as it current exists is a real problem and Dick
provided many examples. SPF should avoid breaking it further, but not
propose new infrastructure to make a bad practice more popular without
fixing the underlying breakage.
--
Seth Goodman
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