
dtaylor at vocalabs
Dec 21, 2007, 12:49 PM
Post #19 of 50
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WebMaster [at] Commerco wrote: > At 01:00 PM 12/21/2007, you wrote: > > >> David Woodhouse wrote: >> > On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 14:15 +0000, Julian Mehnle wrote: >> >> What you don't seem to get is that SPF is an opt-in system. If YOU >> don't >> >> want YOUR mail to be subject to that clear redefinition, don't >> publish an >> >> SPF record for YOUR domain. It's that simple. >> > >> > And if you DO want your mail to be subject to that redefinition, don't >> > send it by SMTP to mail hosts which are only going to behave like they >> > have for more than the last two decades, and violate your bogus >> > assumptions. >> > >> Forwarding my e-mail without my permission or accounting for my SPF >> record to a strict SPF checking host will result in a delivery failure. >> Congratulations, you just denied yourself my e-mail. >> >> Yay you. >> > Now I am confused (not all that unusual). > > If I forward an email from you (with or without your permission) while > claiming to be me and passing that email through my strict SPF host, I > can do that just fine... I think, mostly because I'm not claiming to be > you, but rather forwarding along a message from you (in the DATA section > of the SMTP dialogue) with my information in the header (MAIL FROM > dialogue). > > Now if someone is forwarding my email, claiming to be me, I don't care > for that behavior, thus I have an SPF record in an effort to prevent > that. Where am I going wrong? > You have a point, permission is irrelevant. If you send e-mail from your system with a MAIL FROM claiming to be me, however it got that way, and your system isn't included in my SPF record, AND you are sending it to a system that rejects mail based on SPF failures it will not arrive at the addressee. Since old-style forwarding systems do not change the MAIL FROM to reflect their inclusion in the mail path that is one way a system could be sending mail claiming to be "MAIL FROM" me, which is one leg of the above chain of events. Note that this may be a perfectly legitimate message, but it breaks the chain of accountability and is indistinguishable from a forged e-mail without more costly measures such as digital signatures (and this message is an example of why digital signatures are hardly foolproof themselves...) For some reason that I do not clearly understand this offends Mr. Woodhouse's delicate sensibilities, so he pops up here to complain about it on an irregular basis. -- Daniel Taylor VP Operations Vocal Laboratories, Inc. dtaylor [at] vocalabs http://www.vocalabs.com/ (952)941-6580x203 ------------------------------------------- Sender Policy Framework: http://www.openspf.org Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/735/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/735/ Modify Your Subscription: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=1311532&id_secret=78594745-c67d61 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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