[NCLUG] spam help

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Sun Sep 10 21:10:45 MDT 2006


On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 06:09:36PM -0600, Jake Edge wrote:
>the latter (controllable by email address) is not correct as i 
>understand things, either the domain has a set of legal sending hosts or 
>it doesn't ...

In a featured e-mail server, users can control SPF checking for their
individual mailbox.  As I understand it, that is what Bob was saying.
vPostMaster absolutely does allow an individual user to turn on or off SPF
for their single address.

>I think the problem is that there are those touting it as a anti-spam 
>measure, when it clearly is not and that admins are making decisions 

But, there are those that are touting it as being NOT an anti-spam measure,
and that is absolutely untrue.  If you want to take a hard line on spam and
call it only commercial messages you don't want, then yeah, SPF probably
isn't that effective.

I personally call any e-mail that distracts my attention from my legitimate
e-mail spam, so bounces and back-scatter, or my mail server getting
hammered and me having to spend an hour or two trying to get it to the
point where it can accept legitimate e-mail, all those things are shrapnel
related to spam, and I lump them in the same bucket.

If you want to winge about SPF because it doesn't follow your definition of
"anti-spam measures", then you aren't helping things.  What is your
motivation for detracting from SPF because of terminology lawyering?  SPF
helps reduce the amount of crap I have to deal with as both an e-mail
server administrator and as an e-mail consumer.  And it does a great job of
it.

In the years I've been running SPF I think there may have been two issues
of legitimate mail getting rejected, and both of those I think were simply
configuration issues.  I know one was me not listing some IPs that
originate legitimate e-mail.

>about what recipients of emails from their domain may do with regard to 
>forwarding and that they mostly don't understand the implications ...

Again, untrue.  Only recipients, or their mail server admins, are making
decisions about forwarding.

>you don't forward your email, but others receive your email *may* want 
>to forward it and if you have an SPF record and they use a provider with 
>strict checking, they may not be able to do that ...

If they have SPF enabled on their final destination, and don't forward
e-mail using SRS, then they have improperly configured either the final
destination (and should disable SPF or whitelist the intermediary server),
or the forwarding host (where they should be using SRS).

Sean
-- 
 moshez always wanted to invent a compression scheme called "feather",
 so he could tar and feather his files.
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability




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