Re: SPF and SERVFAIL

(This is my third attempt to post this particular message.  The previous
two were mysteriously blackholed -- my mail logs show normal delivery to
mx-1.listbox.com and yet they have never appeared in the archives or been
returned to me.  Two posts by other people have appeared in the meantime,
so the list as a whole doesn't appear to be dead.

One longshot theory is that my original draft may have been spam-filtered
because I quoted the mail-from of a message I'm pretty sure was a phish.
So I'm making one more try with that address redacted.)

On Wed, 4 Jul 2012, Wayne Doust wrote:
> They also do not collect statistics; do no reporting and probably
> aren't aware of where (if any) log files are stored. This makes it
> difficult for them to resolve issues in part 1.

I do review my own logs every month, but I probably wouldn't notice the
sort of issue you complain about, for the simple reason that I already
accept hundreds of SPF-related 4xx's per month as *baseline noise*.

They appear to be mostly actual spam/phish/etc. (I only see the MAIL
FROM:, but surprisingly often that's enough to tell. Eg: 185 attempts
allegedly from [redacted] last April - a bank in a
foreign country.) The reason for the deferral is usually that the DNS
server of the purported sender domain barfs on Type 99 record lookups.

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