Re: SPF check for moderation relay

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> writes:

Even if you look only at the envelope sender, there will be no real
relationship, since moderation submissions generally go through relay
servers that do not do any of the transformations required by modern
email spam prevention standards, and news servers may or may not use a
valid address as an envelope sender when sending moderation submissions.

Oh, ack, sorry -- I missed the context here that you're talking from the
perspective of running a relay.

As a moderation relay, you're a lot more likely to be able to get away
with SPF, since I think most news servers *do* use an envelope sender that
matches their domain.  However, no, there is no requirement that they do
so; all of this stuff predates email spam filtering standards.

I'm also not entirely sure that you're going to get a lot of benefit from
doing so?  I guess you would be able to filter out spam sent directly to
the moderation relay address, but I'm not sure how common that is compared
to the amount of spam sent via Usenet posting.  I suppose it will probably
vary by group; some groups have likely advertised moderators.isc.org email
addresses for people to use as a backup method of posting if their local
news server doesn't handle relays properly, and in that case those
addresses have probably gotten onto lists of spam addresses.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


--
Approved by robomod. For info contact the admin.
V1.0