Am Monday 14 March 2011 schrieb mir Benoit Panizzon:
We got two customers (one is another ISP) pretending that they have observed, that Google, Sunrise and other Services have startet flagging their customer's emails as spam, because the sender domain has not SPF record. Not an 'non matching' SPF record, but the sender just dones not use SPF at all.
From my point of view especialy an ISP should be very carefull with SPF.
Indeed. In my point of view, SPF is only useful in very special cases because the drawbacks are very wide spreaded and the benefit even small. Forcing SPF for cases where it doesn't fit is a very "interesting" step.
Using SPF in a spam filter to give some minor positive weighting in the spam score is ok but to use it to flag spam? I can't imagine that somebody does that. It sounds very stupid to me.
Regards Oli
Hi Oli
A Customer just forwarded me this which is more or less a confirmation that Google (and Sunrise who uses Google Mail Services) do penalize emails from domains with no SPF:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=de&answer=33786
"Wenn für Ihre Domain kein SPF-Datensatz vorhanden ist, werden Nachrichten von Ihren Nutzern möglicherweise von einigen Empfängerdomains abgelehnt, da nicht bestätigt werden kann, dass die Nachrichten von einem autorisierten Mailserver stammen."
Is google switzerland reading this list?
Do we really have to start using "v=spf1 +all" to make google accept our emails?
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
Benoit Panizzon
On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, Benoit Panizzon wrote:
Hi Oli
A Customer just forwarded me this which is more or less a confirmation that Google (and Sunrise who uses Google Mail Services) do penalize emails from domains with no SPF:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=de&answer=33786
"Wenn für Ihre Domain kein SPF-Datensatz vorhanden ist, werden Nachrichten von Ihren Nutzern möglicherweise von einigen Empfängerdomains abgelehnt, da nicht bestätigt werden kann, dass die Nachrichten von einem autorisierten Mailserver stammen."
Is google switzerland reading this list?
Do we really have to start using "v=spf1 +all" to make google accept our emails?
We've had a similar problem with Google Mail - a freshly created domain name for the conference (unknown on the net earlier) - all emails sent to Google Mail ended up in Junk, unless people wrote us first or somehow added to contacts. We didn't do SPF, we didn't do DKIM (unfortunately) either.
But this was highly annoying (our corespondents resorted to use whatever non-Google alternative accounts they have had).
//Marcin
Hi Benoit
On 14 Mar 2011, at 15:31, Benoit Panizzon wrote:
Hi Oli
A Customer just forwarded me this which is more or less a confirmation that Google (and Sunrise who uses Google Mail Services) do penalize emails from domains with no SPF:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=de&answer=33786
"Wenn für Ihre Domain kein SPF-Datensatz vorhanden ist, werden Nachrichten von Ihren Nutzern möglicherweise von einigen Empfängerdomains abgelehnt, da nicht bestätigt werden kann, dass die Nachrichten von einem autorisierten Mailserver stammen."
Isn't this the other way round? I think Google wants to tell us, this might happen on some domains ("von einigen Empfängerdomains abgelehnt"), not that they're filtering themselves.
Actually if you look at headers ("Received-SPF" and "Authentication-Results") from e-mails processed by Google, they check SPF but in my experience nothing special happens.
On the other side, it's quite suspicious if one sends e-mails from a host with no reference whatsoever to the domain they're relaying for. For example using your Bluewin account to send messages from @gmail.com. I understand ISPs increasing the spam score on such e-mails, but blocking it would be too much.
Just my 0.02€
Cheers
Is google switzerland reading this list?
Do we really have to start using "v=spf1 +all" to make google accept our emails?
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
Benoit Panizzon
I m p r o W a r e A G - ______________________________________________________
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Mathias Seiler
MiroNet GmbH, Strassburgerallee 86, CH-4055 Basel T +41 61 201 30 90, F +41 61 201 30 99
mathias.seiler@mironet.ch www.mironet.ch
A Customer just forwarded me this which is more or less a confirmation that Google (and Sunrise who uses Google Mail Services) do penalize emails from domains with no SPF:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=de&answer=33786
"Wenn für Ihre Domain kein SPF-Datensatz vorhanden ist, werden Nachrichten von Ihren Nutzern möglicherweise von einigen Empfängerdomains abgelehnt, da nicht bestätigt werden kann, dass die Nachrichten von einem autorisierten Mailserver stammen."
Hm, nope, I read this differently: this is targeted towards google customers, and apparently google recommends them to define an SPF record for their domain, because some _other_ mail servers might penalize their mail if they don't.
IMHO SPF is broken by design, and the possible problems far outweigh the small benefits. I've seen again and again problems caused by non-SPF-aware mail redirects, and this is something completely outside the realm of influence of the domain owner. How can you know whether an email address you're writing to is in fact a redirect to another email address? You can't. All those mails will be submitted using a 3rd party mail server as the sending source, which will backfire if the domain defines a too restrictive SPF record. And why would a server that doesn't consider SPF useful go the length of performing source rewriting?
Everyone is allowed to configure his/her mail server to reject incoming mail based on whatever they consider reasonable. This of course includes the right to refuse mail from any host called "banana" or if the checksum of the subject is 13. Hell, you can even use SPF if you want. Does this lead to reliable mail delivery? No. Is it forbidden? No. Does it make sense? You decide.
Cheers, and sorry for the rant, Markus