Stuart D. Gathman wrote on Saturday, March 24, 2007 6:03 PM -0600:
On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, Seth Goodman wrote:
I still believe that the best practice recommendation for large
systems is unrealistic.
You might be right. In that case, alias forwarders will continue
to function as open spam relays, and we'll all switch to Jabber.
I assume you mean that as humor. Seriously, we'd all be better off
if alias forwarding were handled differently, but it is what it is
and it's not going away. We can all agree that the notion of
sending a DSN after successful delivery by SMTP to the designated
mailbox is broken on the face of it.
As to whether alias forwarding creates an open relay, it does
create a relay, though it only redirects to where the account owner
tells it. Therefore, it's of no more use to spammers than any
other delivery address, unlike a real open relay.
Jabber and similar IM protocols may one day supplant SMTP. Until
that happens, we are stuck with alias forwarding. Ignoring this
reality, or declaring that alias forwarding is broken so we need
not provide a palatable workaround, hurts SPF while having no
impact on alias forwarding.
--
Seth Goodman
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