SPF is a failure. The forgot the key component that would have made it work... registration with a central database.
The problem with a central registry is that it would be critical infrastructure that would need to be created/maintained/financed, and would it probably be politicized. It also becomes a single point of failure.
self-publishing in existing infrastructure of DNS was actually SPF's best idea. :)
About the only thing SPF does is increase DNS traffic.
I haven't seen anybody claim that SPF has greatly reduced spam or replaced any other techniques. By the time SPF came along, all of us already had acceptable anti-spam systems, so SPF was really fighting only for crumbs, relegated to marginal impact, if any.
You can't count SPF failure against a message or you'd be blocking a LOT of valid messages.
just like you can't reject email only because of bad helo or bad PTR.
Just my humble opinion. It was a good idea that they stopped short of making useful.
I think, as I've mentioned here before, that if all the effort and time that went into SFP would have been put into big ISPs rejecting any mail with bad helo and/or bad PTR so that such policies became an industry standard that we could all follow and "hide behind" would have helped the spam problem much more than SPF.
Len _____________________________________________________________________ http://IMGate.MEIway.com : free anti-spam gateway, runs on 1000's of sites To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
