Re: SRS/SPF Help Needed

On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Dick St.Peters wrote:

> Stuart D. Gathman writes:
> > Since finaldestination.com is the one that configured publicdomain.com to
> > do the forwarding, a much simpler solution that SRS is to simply not check SPF
> > for mail coming from publicdomain.com.
> 
> In real-life, finaldestination.com usually did NOT have any role in
> configuring (or requesting) forwarding.  It usually does not even know
> the forwarding is occurring until something goes wrong.

Translation:
  In real-life, the administrators at finaldestination.com usually have
no clue what their users are configuring or requesting with regards
to forwarding.  They can't blame the users either, because they don't provide
any mechanism (e.g. a web page or formal request for notification) for their
users to tell them about the forwarding.  This wouldn't be a problem,
except these same administrators decided to start rejecting mail with
SPF fail without understanding what they were doing.

> Much of the point of SRS is to be a solution for forwarders that does
> not require every case to be handled as a special case with some final
> destination.  As a forwarder, SRS enables me to get forwarded mail to
> my users.  As a final destination, SRS (at a forwarder) allows my
> users to receive forwarded mail here without any intervention by me.

Yes, SRS is a reasonable workaround for clueless finaldestinations.  
It even has a certain poetic justice when the SRS forwarder doesn't check
SPF and becomes an open conduit for forged mail - but I'm not sure
that helps SPF.

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <[email protected]>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.