6 ms·

If configuring SPF is juggling chainsaws, then there's no hope for humankind.

snowwrestler 4y ago
Configuring SPF is easy. Keeping perfect track of all the various departments, services, vendors, IP addresses, etc sending on behalf of your domain is very hard in many organizations.
- throwaway67743 4y ago
  It's almost like a working tech department and hierarchy might make sense (also includes mean you can delegate some, but I wouldn't)
- bradknowles 4y ago
  Even if you can keep all that shit running fine for your organization, you can't make any guarantees with regards to these issues for all the other organizations on the planet. In fact, I would argue that you MUST assume that at least some non-trivial percentage of those other organizations are actually fucked up with regards to one or more of these areas. So, therefore, you must be even more conservative than you might otherwise have been. Even if everyone on the planet is a CMM-5 level organization, you're still going to lose the odd space shuttle or two. And maybe also some rockets. The forwarding problem has been with us since Internet e-mail was first created, and I don't see that problem going away. Ever. All you can do is decide how you're going to handle that for your own accounts where you set up forwarding, which may very well break e-mail coming from domains that don't fully understand the problem.
- johnklos 4y ago
  You see, there's too much normalization of the idea that everyone should be free to do everything. We see too much push to have developers maintain their own infrastructure, which is partly why there's such a big (and artificial) push to put everything in the cloud, and this often ends up costing much more in the long run. Just like how regular developers shouldn't be able to push work in to a cloud that'll end up costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars without deliberate, thought out reasoning, random people in a company should not be able to set up outgoing email using a company's domain without good reasoning. If a person or a group were responsible for outgoing email, then nobody would be allowed, nor should they be able, to send without going through that person / group. Problem solved! But if you think it's OK for any random person at an organization to just set up whatever kind of outgoing email they want, well, you get what you expect.

Configuring SPF is easy. Keeping perfect track of all the various departments, services, vendors, IP addresses, etc sending on behalf of your domain is very hard in many organizations.

throwaway67743 4y ago
It's almost like a working tech department and hierarchy might make sense (also includes mean you can delegate some, but I wouldn't)
bradknowles 4y ago
Even if you can keep all that shit running fine for your organization, you can't make any guarantees with regards to these issues for all the other organizations on the planet. In fact, I would argue that you MUST assume that at least some non-trivial percentage of those other organizations are actually fucked up with regards to one or more of these areas. So, therefore, you must be even more conservative than you might otherwise have been. Even if everyone on the planet is a CMM-5 level organization, you're still going to lose the odd space shuttle or two. And maybe also some rockets. The forwarding problem has been with us since Internet e-mail was first created, and I don't see that problem going away. Ever. All you can do is decide how you're going to handle that for your own accounts where you set up forwarding, which may very well break e-mail coming from domains that don't fully understand the problem.
johnklos 4y ago
You see, there's too much normalization of the idea that everyone should be free to do everything. We see too much push to have developers maintain their own infrastructure, which is partly why there's such a big (and artificial) push to put everything in the cloud, and this often ends up costing much more in the long run. Just like how regular developers shouldn't be able to push work in to a cloud that'll end up costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars without deliberate, thought out reasoning, random people in a company should not be able to set up outgoing email using a company's domain without good reasoning. If a person or a group were responsible for outgoing email, then nobody would be allowed, nor should they be able, to send without going through that person / group. Problem solved! But if you think it's OK for any random person at an organization to just set up whatever kind of outgoing email they want, well, you get what you expect.