On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 4:47 AM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > I would say the opposite. Mail forwarding was there before SPF, so anybody > who designed SPF should have taken that into account. They didn't. So SPF is > the "bad guy" here among these two. SPF is the one that breaks forwarding, > not forwarding the one that breaks SPF.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. My opinion is that things change over time. Innovations come about that improve a certain situation (i.e. email) and sometimes that encompasses certain sacrifices. I feel like automatic email forwarders were more of a 90s technology. People wanted to be able to check all of their mail in their Hotmail account or in Eudora or Pegasus Mail. Over time, spam/phishing/spoofing (SPF is more of an anti-spoofing measure) became more and more problematic. Everywhere you looked people were complaining about the spam/phishing/spoofed email messages they were receiving. Developers of SPF came up with the idea of authenticating email based on the sending IP and DNS definition, BUT... this is going to break automatic email forwarding. So service providers that adopted SPF as an anti-spam/phishing/spoofing measure had to decide, which was more important: Continuing to allow automatic forwarding or adopt a measure that could lessen the spam/phishing/spoofed messages that their user base receives. I feel like automatic forwarders are used a lot less today than they were in the 90s or 00s. They're still used, but not as much. Maybe I'm wrong in that regard. Maybe the mass of Internet and email users need to start protesting against SPF and in favor of automatic email forwarding because automatic email forwarding is preferred over anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-spoofing SPF measures. If you survey 100 people and 80 people would prefer SPF measures over allowing automatic email forwarding... sure it sucks if you're one of the 20 that voted the other way... but that's how majority works. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
