Email Server Solution

Steve Buehler steve at ibapp.com
Wed Aug 3 13:21:00 UTC 2005


At 02:37 PM 8/2/2005, you wrote:
>>>It sounds like most of your problems with AOL blocking you because 
>>>of spammers or viruses could be stopped by setting up a spf (TXT) 
>>>dns record for your domain or the domains that you are in charge 
>>>of. AOL pays attention to these and will drop any mail that comes 
>>>from an IP that you do not put in the record.
>>
>>Ok. I give. What in the heck is an spf (TXT) record? Something that 
>>just came out this year? I have everything that AOL requires now. 
>>If that is a new term for a PTR or reverse record, then I already have it.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

         Another problem that I have noticed with implementing this 
is that a lot of hosting providers tell their customers to use their 
ISP for their outgoing email because it would normally be faster.  We 
have several customers of ours that have connection issues between 
themselves and the our server that is hosting their sites.  Not 
because of anything on our end, but because they are, usually, in 
another country on a crappy dialup ISP.  If everybody implemented the 
SPF, then these people would not be able to send out email with the 
return address of their domain unless it came from the server their 
domain was on.
         Myself, I have several return addresses that are valid, but 
have all of my email forwarded to one account to pick it up from.  I 
also have setup an outgoing email server for myself instead of 
popping into each account.  My domains are on 3 different servers and 
I am not the only one on those domains, but am the only one on my 
outgoing email server that I have setup in my house.  I would have to 
get rid of my email server and start using the servers where the 
domains are at, or have to setup an email server that would allow 
everybody on our domains to use so that we are all coming from the 
same server that the SPF policy was setup for.
         SPF sounds like a good idea, but would be hard to 
enforce.  Wouldn't it be easier and more beneficial to have the world 
come together and implement the death penalty for spammers, hackers 
(illegal hackers) and virus programmers? 




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