----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Anyone see a TXT record for aol.com? They disable the SPF text records today as they are still in a testing phase. This from Meng this morning on the SPF list: ========= summary: don't be surprised if AOL turns off the record over the weekend or even the next week while they collate data. This is why it's important that they hear from us "look, with just a few MTAs running SPF we caught BIGNUM spams" so please report what numbers you can get tomorrow. On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 09:45:47PM -0500, the Director of Anti-Spam Operations At AOL wrote: | So AOL is hearing some reports about issues like the person from pobox | described. We may roll this back tomorrow especially considering the | upcoming weekend. Keep in mind that we usually implement big changes | like this for a period of hours and then roll back to see if we get | calls. So don't be suprised if this comes out shortly. Also, don't be | suprised if we re-implement it again too. This is a very good learning | experience for AOL and everyone in the Internet email/antispam | community. So don't be depressed if we roll back for a bit. :-) | I wrote to him: Rolling back would be fine by me; we've learned a lot of interesting things from the experiment. Tomorrow I'll give you some stats on how many spams were blocked. I've written to the major forwarding service providers (acm.org, alumniconnections, etc) explaining what they will have to do to adapt. (If anyone comes to you, send them to http://spf.pobox.com/emailforwarders.png) In any case, speaking as the owner of a forwarding company, I can say that the onus belongs on us. For our part, we'll roll out sender rewriting tomorrow and there won't be any more problems with AOL -> pobox -> SPF bounces. I've offered to help the other providers as well but who knows how quickly they move. Rolling out, then back, then out again is like warning shots across the bow, enough to galvanize them without making them enemies of the whole thing. I think it's good that AOL publishes the record now because it allows SPF to ease in with relatively little breakage, with a kind of gorilla argument to silence the technical critics who won't ever be satisfied anyway. Right now the number of SPF-enabled SMTP receivers is practically nil. Anybody who got a bounce due to SPF is an early adopter, willing to cope. If SPF had been more widely rolled out on the receiver end, people would get riled up and say that SPF and AOL both were breaking things. Slow and steady gives people get time to adjust. It's like silly putty: go slowly and it flows, lean hard and it will snap. Thanks again for being willing to do the experiment. ========= AOL ran with thier SPF records all day yesterday and I saw a huge increase in my SPF pass/fail reporting yesterday (more than a 10 fold increase). Bill
