[LINK] Question re spoofing with bad reply address

[Stephen Rothwell]

Hi Jeremy,

On Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:59:45 +1000 Jeremy Visser <jeremy at visser.name> wrote:
>
> On 09/07/14 17:35, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> > SPF is broken by design (consider forwarding - including mailing 
> > lists).
> 
> That’s because you’re forwarding incorrectly.  SPF validation is done based
> on the envelope, not the To/From headers, and all good mailing list software
> will fix this for you.  For example, your e-mail from the list to me contained
> these pertinent headers:

I am not actually forwarding incorrectly, but you are right, the
mailing list example is a furphy (these days) that I should not have raised.

However, it does break any "normal" sort of forwarding unless the
forwarder goes to quite some effort when forwarding emails (that effort is
needed to allow the correct sending of error notifications).

Also, it seems from various sources that gmail (at least) are drawing
conclusions about whether an email is spam based on the *lack* fo SPF
information.  So if you have all your email forwarded to gmail (and
many do), then if the sender domain publishes explicit SPF information,
gmail will probably bounce it and if the sender domain does not publish
any SPF information, gmail may put it in your spam folder.  This is
partly caused by SPF's breakage of mail forwarding and partly gmail's
(assumed) overzealousness.

(I say "assumed" because I have found it impossible to get any response
from anyone at gmail when I complain about my emails going astray.)

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    sfr at canb.auug.org.au
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