[Asrg] SPF, was where the message

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 21 January 2009 01:04:27 +0000 John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:

>>> Don't hold your breath.  SPF is dead -- and good riddance, it was a very
>>> stupid idea --
>>
>> So dead that of hotmail.com, gmail.com, mac.com, apple.com,
>> microsoft.com,  facebook.com, ebay.com only er..., all of them publish
>> SPF records.
>
> For largely political reasons, Hotmail requires anyone sending a
> significant amount of mail to them to have Sender-ID records.
>
> For senders that are on its whitelist, AOL reverse engineers the IP
> addresses to whitelist from the sender's SPF records, which is way
> easier all around than the former mostly manual system.
>
> Since S-ID falls back to SPF records, most senders just publish one set of
> SPF records for both.  Note that neither of these are using SPF for its
> nominal purpose; I'm not aware of any large system that does.

They're using it for whitelisting purposes instead of its nominal purpose? 
That's exactly what I'm discussing. I think SPF has a bad reputation in 
some quarters because people think of how it breaks forwarding (etc). 
That's a shame, because it has huge potential when it comes to 
whitelisting, and therefore reducing false positives in filtering.

Heck, a career change isn't the same thing as death!

> R's,
> John
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-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
x3148