Good case made at link against using spf(Open Relaying
by SRS wrapper, etc). Listing of alternatives, links to.

http://www.advogato.org/article/816.html

"Some people claim that SPF directly combats spam. It doesn't. SPF
attempts to address forgery. In fact, a large amount of spam rates an
SPF 'pass' result, because spammers have rapidly adopted SPF for
themselves. You still need a blacklist or other kind of trust database,
to tell you which domains are trustworthy and which are not. But we
already have lots of blacklists; it's just that we list the IP address
instead of the domain name, to tell you which hosts are trustworthy
and which are not."

Open Relaying with an SRS wrapper--

"By rewriting the address of mail you're forwarding so that it appears
to come from your own domain, you put your own reputation on the line"

"Any spamming host can do the SRS trick to 'take responsibility' for
forwarded mail. If your ISP receives mail from the address I used in
the above example -- '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
-- then they have no real way of telling whether it really did come from
Bill Gates via my servers, or whether it's a fake. SPF would just accept
the mail, depending on my domain's reputation in the trust database.
It's all about how much you trust the one server which is offering the
mail -- it's not an end-to-end authentication. So SPF is really not any
better than blacklisting by IP address or HELO name"

"The original sender address is useful information, and can be lost if
an intermediate host mangles the mail by using SRS. A sender address
may be present in a blacklist, or may fail SMTP callouts. Yet an
intermediate host 'takes responsibility' for the mail in question,
causing it to be accepted anyway. Sender addresses are also used for
mail filtering. The sender address is the most reliable method of
filtering mailing list traffic into its own folder; using Cc: and/or
To: headers has both false positives and false negatives, and using
the List-Id: header has false positives too. Again, SRS mangles this
information"

"By implementing SES or BATV, you can instantly stop accepting
bounces to mail which you didn't send"

______

"MARID is dead(thanks to Microsoft trying to poison-pill linux/bsd)"




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