SPF and the way of the Quick Fix
First off, I like that at least we’re trying something, SPF is a quick-fix for spam problems…. But it’s still a quick-fix not a good-fix.
I’ll jump right into the problem I’ve been having with SPF, mail forwarding. Most mail-forwarding doesn’t rewrite the envelope sender as it probably shouldn’t but since it doesn’t the SPF tests are done against the envelope senders domain and thus fail as coming from a “bad” server.
For those that prefer a real example, sending an email address from test@server-barn.net (my nameserver/etc domain) to one of my business emails redirects to my gmail (it’s easier that way), but gmail receives the message after redirection as coming from test@server-barn.net and sees it as a fail.
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning test@server-barn.net does not designate 202.125.46.246 as permitted sender)
So gmail (doesn’t yet) but will reject this message, because I have setup SPF on server-barn.net
