[Sorry I'm not replying to the original mail, I seem to have missed it] At 12/14/2004 10:01 AM +0000, someone wrote: >> Hi, I have heard that SPF is controversial among mail administrators. Why >is that? How many >> people use it (on this mailing list)?
My main beef is that SPF breaks forwarding for domains which wrongly assume that no one would want to forward their mail legitimately. Eg. someone from AOL sends mail to one of our hosting clients, whose setup forwards the mail to a 3rd party server. If the 1st (aol) and 3rd party uses SPF, the mail would get flagged/rejected. Essentially if you set up restrictive SPF records for your domain, you're saying that no one is allowed to forward your messages (except the servers you specify). Perhaps that is desirable to some, but IMHO this _breaks_ SMTP. At 12/15/2004 03:13 AM -0500, Matt Kettler wrote: >Of course, there's other arguments too.. Redirectors, forwarding services, >etc, but these have their solutions. (Hint: SPF at each stage, and when you >remail, use a return path that points at your own servers like a mailing list >does. Poof, problem solved.) Poof, problem created. What am I supposed to do with a message that gets returned to my "remailer" address? Keep track of where it came from just in case? For how long? No mail server I know of does this currently, nor is there any formal spec, RFC, etc. that establishes a precedent. I'm not trying to pick an argument, nor will I respond to one on-list. This discussion has been hacked to death on Postfix list and probably many others. More on a personal level, why does the SPF @ pobox.com site look like a corporate advertisement for a product? Why do we need a bunch of clipart images to "sell" something like a mail protocol if it's really such a good idea? Why do I get the feeling someone wants to make $$$ off this? What happened to the list of issues that people have with SPF that used to be on that site? All that just rubs me the wrong way. "SPF has already been adopted by AOL, Earthlink and Google. Shouldn't your company be next?" Sounds like marketing talk, not geek-speak. Cheers, -Max
