[SpamCop-List] Re: SDF.org sporadically listed in bl.spamcop.net

[Frank Ellermann]

John E. Malmberg wrote:

> I have zero control of the DNS or the domain that is
> providing the service.

Right, it's of course only an option for the domain owner.

In "my" case it's a plain stupid catchall vanity host, so
it's not really "my" domain or "my" policy, but something
my ISP did for all their users, a wilcard policy record -
any foo.claranet.de has the same policy as bar.claranet.de,
excl. special cases like www.claranet.de, "www" is no mail
user, it has its own IP and is a Web server :-)

> The domain only provides me a forwarding service for incoming
> e-mail and does not provide me and the thousands of other
> users with out going mail service.

With your own domain that wouldn't be a problem, let "your" MX
forward mails to some other address as it or rather you wishes.
You'd need a (super)set of IPs sending MAIL FROM you.

It sounds like you use a typical "Web space + domain" provider,
and in theory they could offer to publish a sender policy for
you, with a simple Web form, where you'd paste your latest and
greatest idea for your sender policy.

Some "Web space + domain" providers support this, there's a
list at <http://www.kitterman.com/spf/txt.html>

Some minutes later...  no, won't work for QSL.net, that's Web
space + single mail address without a domain.  With a single
address you shouldn't get too much backscatter, and otherwise
your best defense is at the QSL.net MX, if they use BLs like
the SCBL to reject mails from blacklisted sources.

AFAIK pobox.com offers "per user" SPF policies, but that's no
free service like QSL, and a bit of advanced SPF magic.  The
admin of QSL should better stay away from it, unless he's very
interested and willing to read the 56 pages of the SPF spec.
at least twice.  It's no rocket science, but also not trivial.

Support on the spf-help list is "free", so if you're that QSL
admin and looking for a fun project "per user SPF policies" it
should work after some time.
                            Bye, Frank