All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

when email goes bad, for CPAN user JDHEDDEN

merlyn on 2005-11-10T20:05:33

I'm trying to contact cpan user JDHEDDEN. But when I try the address, given spam protected in his just-released module (

Jerry D. Hedden,
), I get 
Hi. This is the James mail server at linux.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.  Below
I include the list of recipients and the reason why I was unable to deliver
your message.

jerry@hedden.us
554 refused mailfrom because of SPF policy
which is bogus. I hate being able to not reach someone, especially when I want to contribute to their public work.

But even worse, this is probably an example of an overly agressive spam filter. I remember the net before spam. I long for those days.

Sender Policy Framework

itub on 2005-11-10T20:41:12

What's happening is that his server is using strict SPF rules, and the domain of your email address doesn't implement SPF (or the IP you used is not allowed by your domain). Given that SPF is fairly new, I would not recommend using strict rules, but that's the way it goes...

Re:Sender Policy Framework

merlyn on 2005-11-10T23:39:53

Well, I was able to reach him directly at the indicated bounced address. So the problem is more likely that he has a forwarding system that doesn't rewrite the "from" (the big flaw in these systems like SPF), and didn't bother testing it.

Re:Sender Policy Framework

merlyn on 2005-11-11T17:09:44

And to followup to myself, yes, he has SPF enabled on his ultimate mailbox, but his "public" mailbox is a naive forwarder, and this breaks SPF.

The problem is squarely his fault. He should change his ultimate mailbox, disable SPF on his mailbox, or fix his forwarder. Maybe he wasn't aware of his problem before, but he certain is aware now.