[OSM-talk] Sender policy framework mail for openstreetmap.org

[Nick Hill]

Hello Matthew

I had considered this issue, but as you have raised the concern, it will be 
worthwhile taking even more care.

As you mention, SPF does raise issues for people receiving forwarded mail. Not 
just from openstreetmap, but from gmail, hotmail, pobox.com, bbc.co.uk etc. All 
these use SPF.

So this is a general issue to consider not just in the context of openstreetmap. 
It is important to remember this it won't stop people receiving mail through 
properly configured mail systems.

Your mail set-up will likely be broken if the MTA on your side of the forwarder 
implements SPF and you have not told it to accept mail from your forwarder.

Given such a set-up will cause problems for many senders, I feel it is unlikely 
that any subscriber will have a mis-configured mail system which both 1) only 
forwards openstreetmap data and 2) has SPF on the MTA behind the forwarder.

However, given this change could potentially silently stop someone with a broken 
set-up receiving mail who did previously receive mail, I have temporarily 
changed the SPF action to ?all. I will send another message then change this to 
~all or -all later to make sure that any member of the list with a broken 
configuration will at least get a final message telling them what has happened, 
and how they might fix it.

I have found implementing SPF on my own domain immediately stopped large numbers 
of bounced spam messages reaching my mailbox. This is good evidence that SPF is 
now widely implemented and is potentially effective at stopping spam, and that 
such widespread adoption will likely have led to most mail systems (in terms of 
bulk) now being properly configured to handle SPF.



matthew-osm at newtoncomputing.co.uk wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 06:22:17PM +0000, Nick Hill wrote:
>> I have added a sender policy framework DNS entry for openstreetmap.org.
> 
> I guess there aren't that many e-mails that have a from address with the domain
> openstreetmap.org (probably automated messages), so this probably won't affect
> too much, but I assume you thought about the implications before adding this?
> i.e. users who forward their mail (or have it forwarded for them automatically
> by their ISP, for instance) may not get it any more...
> 
> Just checking!
> 
> Thanks,
>