I am logging the returns from the module and now compare them to SA now that SA has SPF checks embedded, this is just what I noticed SA is doing with them: SPF_SOFTFAIL and speculated that many ISPs are just lazy in this regard or do not really know what they have out there and are not giving out a "FAIL" return in most every case and are abusing the softfail section. In other words... softfail should not be a permanent situation, but in many cases I have seen, the response has remained a softfail return for over a year..... go figure.
Well, if we were confident that all forwarders, greeting cards, mailing lists, "send this page to your friends!" etc. would use their own envelope senders, we might use -all instead of ~all. I'd love to cut down on the insane number of bounces we get for [EMAIL PROTECTED] by switching from SOFTFAIL to FAIL. (Not that I expect many sites to handle FAIL results in a way that will do this.)
The thing is, people don't take kindly to false positives. When you have a large number of users with varying connection types, network setups, OSes, email programs, email usage patterns, etc., you have to approach things like this cautiously.
This is *not* a short transition period, however much we'd all like it to be. AOL has been publishing SPF records for over a year now, and even they still use NEUTRAL -- they haven't even gone to SOFTFAIL, never mind FAIL.
Anyway, onto SA's SPF checks: If I'm reading the Plugin/SPF.pm code right, it looks like it converts an empty result to a softfail (line 240, $result ||= 'softfail'). It should never happen -- Mail::SPF::Query returns "none" if there's no SPF record and "neutral" if the record explicitly uses "?" -- but it might increase the number of SPF_SOFTFAIL hits under certain conditions.
-- Kelson Vibber SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net> _______________________________________________ Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.canit.ca MIMEDefang mailing list MIMEDefang@lists.roaringpenguin.com http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
