Email sent from the Forum has problemas with SPF

[Pepinno]

Hello.

I am getting email notifications from the Forum software when there is activity in the threads I follow.

Those emails are getting through to me, but my email server in complaining that the SPF for the "vcfed.org" domain is not all right.

In my email server logs, I see this:

SPF PermError (Redundant applicable 'v=spf1' sender policies found): Envelope-from: erik@vcfed.org

Indeed, there seems to be that there are two SPF records in DNS for the "vcfed.org" domain:

$ host -t txt vcfed.org
vcfed.org descriptive text "v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:162.208.84.200 +ip4:162.208.84.225 +ip4:199.193.246.42 ~all"
vcfed.org descriptive text "v=spf1 include:_spf.rcmailsv.com ~all"

According to RFC7208, section 3.2, "A domain name MUST NOT have multiple records that would cause an authorization check to select more than one record."

So I just wanted to let the Forum Administrator know about this.

 

[tingo]

IMNSHO, everyone has problems with SPF. It is a bad solution (it doesn't solve the problem it set out to), it is badly implemented by those who use it, and it is also not very widely implemented.

 

[Pepinno]

IMNSHO, everyone has problems with SPF. It is a bad solution (it doesn't solve the problem it set out to), it is badly implemented by those who use it, and it is also not very widely implemented.

I disagree. Not everyone has problems with SPF. It's a quite effective solution to solve the problem it was meant to solve (to stop domain spoofing at the SMTP transaction level, aka in the SMTP envelope, therefore stopping joe-jobs and backscatter spam), and it is widely implemented (SPF protects about 85% of all legitimate mailboxes worldwide, as Yahoo is the only big Mailbox Service Provider not using SPF).

I concur with you that for people without email expertise at the MTA level, it not easy to correctly set up SPF. That affects mainly people using cheap ControlPanel-based VPS solutions (of which there are many, but in the aggregate they amount to a small number of legitimate mailboxes in relative terms).

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Edit: I see that nowadays even Yahoo.com is using SPF, although with "?all" as they never really believed in it. We know how well that has worked for them and your their users...