SPF Configurations

Fri Dec 4 19:21:07 UTC 2009

>From talking to a few people so far it seems like it might be better to
have the development team here alter our applications to use a separate
Envelope From and friendly From.  I can display the email address with
the customers domain, but the mail will be coming from our address as
the Envelope From.  That way the customer is happy their end user is
seeing the email coming from their domain, while the Envelope From shows
an email address that matches our domain.  Seems like a simpler
solution.

Thank you all for your input, as I know this may be a bit off topic for
this list.

Jeffrey

-----Original Message-----
From: Graeme Fowler [mailto:graeme at graemef.net] 
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 1:59 PM
To: NANOG
Subject: RE: SPF Configurations

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 11:45 -0500, Jeffrey Negro wrote:
> Thanks for your input on this.  My main concern is mail filters at the
> end users side thinking that our mail servers are spoofing our
> customer's domain.

If you really feel that SPF is going to help, then keep all the mail in
your domain's control by using VERP addresses as the envelope sender
address (like most decent modern MLM packages do).

That way you can have a "From: " header in the customer domain (or of
your choosing), and the envelope sender in your own. The benefit here is
that not only does it make the usage of SPF a lot less complex, but it
also means that all bounces come back to the originating system and can
be handled accordingly.

Have a look at the headers of this message for a well-formed example.

Of course, this does depend upon people believing that SPF is actually
useful...

Graeme