Michael Deutschmann wrote on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 4:30 AM -0500:
So, I think it is quite possible that if forwarders push an "Implement
TENBOX/E such that we never see a 5xx, or else your customers lose
their forwarding" ultimatum, the ISPs will also buckle and deploy
TENBOX/E.
I have a very different picture of who decides what. ISP's and large
email providers virtually give away email services to most customers,
they generate the lion's share of overall revenue so they dictate the
terms. They don't care about the eventual survival of forwarders, and
they'd just as soon seem them disappear as deal with an imaginary
threat.
Rather, large ISP's and email providers will do exactly what they find
in their own interest, and forwarding is only one consideration. It is
true they haven't gone with SPF largely because they don't want to break
existing forwarding. However, they are unlikely to invest significant
effort in order to preserve forwarding. Not breaking it is sufficient
until such time as it is forced to either change into something less
damaging to SMTP mail transport or go away altogether.
My concern is that the time when current alias forwarding is no longer
acceptable could be a long time coming and SPF won't be widely
implemented before that. I believe that SPF is in all legitimate
mailers' best interest, except current alias forwarders. SPF is
predicated on *everyone* taking responsibility for everything they emit,
while alias forwarders wish to be exempt because they're operating per
their users' instructions. Given the reality that ISP customers blame
the ISP for all spam in their inbox, ISP's have little incentive to
whitelist forwarders, less incentive to exempt them from content checks
and even less incentive to exempt them from blacklists when they cause
backscatter.
--
Seth Goodman
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