On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 18:40, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> he's actually just enforcing the requirements of the RFCs, except he has
> an exception to allow for some common misconfigurations. I don't see
> how you can say that RFC 2821 has had less thought and design going into
> it than SPF.
Oh god I thought we were past that form of idiocy by now.
MX hosts have absolutely fuck all to do with which hosts may send mail.
For example, look at pretty much *any* of the big ISPs. They have
multiple clusters of mail machines. One group of machines handles
incoming mail - they have the MXes pointing at them. A different
cluster of machines handles outgoing mail, they are not part of the
MXes, and may often have a completely different machine name than the
domains they handle.
SPF gives a way to associate sending machines with sender domains by
using additional data which was not available until SPF codified a way
of presenting it in the DNS. Pretending you can derive this information
from the MX hosts for a domain is pure delusion. [This is not to be
taken as a statement that I think SPF is an unmitigated good thing]
Before you argue back at this remember I have built and operated a multi
million user mail system from scratch, and on this subject I know my
stuff.
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
