Re: SPF and bouncing

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012, alan wrote:
> may i suggest we take this offlist as I'm sure the debate about
> bouncing is really of no interest to (and definitely not really relevant
> to SPF at all)
It is so germane to SPF, because we are discussing how SPF Pass changes
(or doesn't change) the situation.

As regards the no-SPF and SPF neutral-or-worse cases, I support the
Conspiracy unreservedly.

> we do not allow users to block for <> alone ever,

What if they blacklist an IP address range, and whitelist a specific
e-mail address that happens to come from a smarthost in that range?

Goldlisting is just the subset of that case where 0.0.0.0/0 is on the
private host blacklist.

> ok this is the one time bounces MAY legitimately occur (disk quotas)
Ooooooooooooh.  So you're not a full conspiracy member after all.

Back in 2009, I was part of an argument on the now defunct
news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting group with a guy named D.Stussy.  He
was protesting that some of UCEProtect's backscatter list traps did not
have SPF records.

He considered it impossible to avoid bounces due to quota issues, and
thus held that only people with strict Pass-or-Fail SPF records,
allowing every last forgery to be detected and refused at the edge, were
entitled to freedom from backscatter.

I wonder which side you'd have been on, were you there.  Remember, we were
explictly discussing *ALL* bounces, not just those arising from stubborn
end-users who want to contentfilter away from the edge.

---- Michael Deutschmann <[email protected]>