> On May 20, 2017, at 2:13 PM, John Levine <[email protected]> wrote: > > In article <[email protected]> you write: >> "~all" is the smart policy to use; ignore those who tell you to use "-all" >> or "?all". > > Not disagreeing, but what practical difference do you see between ~all > softfail and ?all neutral ?
There are a couple of differences. The directly operational one is that ~all is in much more common use, by senders of large quantities of generally wanted email, so I trust recipients to handle ~all in the way I'd expect. I don't have that confidence with ?all (or -all, come to that). The indirectly operational one is that "?all" implies (to me, at least, and I think others) that the generator of the SPF record is "testing" or hasn't faith in their SPF deployment, so suggesting that the remainder of the SPF record may not be accurate. That means that there's not the same level of positive signal associated with a ?all pass as with a ~all pass. Like everything else in email, you really want to signal both that you know what you're doing and that your mail is pretty much like the mail of other normal, competent, well-behaved senders. Sometimes you're signaling that to automation, other times you're signaling it to a human postmaster, after automation has flagged a problem or triggered on your mail stream. Using a nice, vanilla SPF record is a tiny piece of that, but it is a piece. Cheers, Steve _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
