Re: Why SRS really sucks

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 12:46 +0000, Julian Mehnle wrote:
> > So if I take your message and resend it with all the headers
> > unmodified, just using my own envelope sender, then it is a fake?  No,
> > it isn't!  It is a perfectly legal case of the layer separation
> > between RFC 2821 and RFC 2822.
>
> If _you_ (the user) resend it, then yes -- of course it's not a fake.
> The accepted norm is to add Resent-From:, Resent-To, Resent-Message-Id:
> headers when you do that.
>
> If the message is just passing through a system in transit, and the
> reverse-path is mangled from its original form to some new form, then
> that's understood by many to be 'fake'. But you're just arguing about a
> choice of words -- to suggest that he doesn't understand SRS or SPF just
> because he considers SRS-mangled addresses to be 'fake' addresses is
> somewhat disingenuous of you.
>
> Of _course_ SRS provides 'fake' addresses. That's the whole _point_ of
> it. They're not real addresses with a mailbox (and a person) behind them
> -- they're fake addresses because you decided you didn't want to send
> the mail on with the original and correct reverse-path.

So all e-mail aliases and mailing lists are 'fake' addresses?  Is a 
postmaster@ address 'fake' because it is forwarded to some real person's 
address?  Does my work address become fake while I'm on vacation just 
because it gets forwarded to someone else?  I don't think this definition 
of 'fake' is very helpful.

> What I said (or at least what I _intended_ to say) was that you
> shouldn't do this mangling except where it's actually necessary to work
> around a problem which can't be fixed in other ways.
>
> Mostly I find that the problem _can_ be fixed in other ways -- usually
> by getting the offending recipient to stop using SPF to reject mail, or
> by getting the offending sender to stop publishing SPF records with
> '-all'.

What problem?

I know you're going to reply: "The problem that SPF rejects forwarded mail 
w/o the sender address rewritten", but that is one of the fundamental 
points of SPF.  If you don't want that to happen to the mail you send, 
don't publish SPF.  However if you _do_ want it, there is no problem.  
Please accept that there are people who do not want their mail to be 
forwarded w/o the envelope sender address rewritten.  (Like me and many 
others, Johann seems to belong to that crowd.)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEMSN6wL7PKlBZWjsRAkLyAKCbB8tu0gD9r0YHPh17mxwW8xHhkACgvut+
715KQS/mOwBkbv1Q+iRKmRo=
=S/cc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----