On 2/25/2010 8:08 PM, Marc Perkel wrote:
The forward issue is definitely an annoyance. But SPF has a problem in that as the supporters admit, it doesn't block spam, and it can't be used as a white rule because spammers often use SPF correctly. I'm not sure what you mean that forwarding has been depricated. Lots of people forward email for a lot of different reasons. I don't understand what you mean.
SPF wasn't meant to block spam, please stop asserting that. It may prove useful as part of an overall spam fighting solution, but that's not the point of the original design. Just as FCrDNS has proven to be a useful tool in spam fighting, it was never intended to be used that way either. Off-site forwarding has been deprecated, mostly due to spam fighting methods, but for many other good reasons too.
Every modern mail solution allows an account holder to pop/imap to another account to pull in mail from somewhere else. Forwarding only assists the lazy and breaks spam filtering. If there wasn't another option, sure, off-site forwarding would still be needed/wanted/required. That's just not the case anymore, and fighting it causes greater loss of service than adopting it. Spam filtering is simply more important than handling the exception cases where someone refuses to pull in mail from somewhere else.
I understand this doesn't match the design of your service, but that doesn't make SPF wrong for the reasons you state. Off-site forwarding is old technology and old thinking. Solutions exist to fix your problem, as I stated previously. SPF may break forwarding, but forwarding breaks spam filtering...and what's more important when there's already a plethora of solutions to deal with forwarding?
/out
