Re: Sending Non Delivery Reports? (was Pump and Dump)

Blammo wrote:
> On 05 May 2006, - Garen Erdoisa entered spamcop and left 
> news:[email protected]:
> 
>> That is what SPF (Sender Policy Framework) does. You don't have to 
>> blacklist yourself, you just publish what IP's can be used in 
>> combination with your domain name. Every other possible combination is 
>> thus blacklisted by those who honor SPF records.
>>
> 
> That's only useful if you have control over your DNS text records for your 
> domain, and you know the outgoing mail servers that any user of your domain 
> might use.

This is not an insurmountable problem.

Every domain owner potentially has such control since only the domain 
owner can point their domain at any given DNS. A domain owner doesn't 
have to use the DNS services of their provider. Even if they do choose 
to use their provider, a simple phone call to tech support with 
instructions on what to include in an SPF record will generally suffice.

As for outgoing mail servers the protocol is very flexible. There are 
lots of ways to specify acceptable outgoing servers besides using 
numeric ranges. A bit of testing can figure it out.

> 
> That's only part of the problem with SPF, and you almost never want to use 
> SPF-Fail (If you can even figure it out from their documentation).
> 

Well I can only speak for myself, but I have been using SPF now for over 
a year and have yet to see a case where rejecting an email that failed 
an SPF check caused any problems. For me at least it solved far more 
problems that it might potentially have caused.

Thousands of sites use it with no problems. The only problems it might 
cause that I am aware of are for relay servers, and there are 
workarounds for those situations that which are discussed in the protocol.

I had no problem figuring it out. I have had no problem using SPF "fail" 
myself, and configuring to reject messages that fail an SPF check.

--
Garen