On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 10:23:43PM +0100, Marcin Zaj?czkowski wrote:

Hi,

If that list it not suitable for my question, please let me know how to reach the Postmaster.

I gave my email address in fedoraproject.org domain a few people and recently I was informed that mails sent to it bounce with error message:

<<< 550 SPF Error: Please see http://spf.pobox.com/why.html?sender=some-strange-account%40wsisiz.edu.pl&am... 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

It looks there is a problem with SPF. 209.132.177.92 (mx1-phx.redhat.com) is not allowed to send mails from wsisiz.edu.pl domain (which is true) and a message is bounced by a destination email server (where mails from @fedoraproject.org are redirected). Probably it's not possible to receive any email sent from a domain with SPF enabled.

Is there a way to make it work?

I'm not a SPF specialist, but I don't have problems with mails redirected from @users.sf.net.

mail forwarding is the primary achilles heel of SPF. There's nothing fedoraproject.org can do about the SPF records that your domain has published. And fedoraproject.org does not currently implement an SPF- forwarding-enabled service, as it's really quite painful to do.

Perhaps your domain can not specify "-all" (hard fail messages originating from elsewhere), and instead specify "~all" (this message didn't come from one of our mail servers, perhaps it needs additional spam scrutiny).

Does anybody know how SourceForge deal with that? I receive mail sent via @users.sf.net alias without any problem.

Perhaps your ISP made an exclusion for them?

I used to work at an ISP and quickly realized it was much more useful to have SPF as a spam scoring contributor, rather than hard rejecting email based on it. Just caused more headaches than it was worth.

Definitely worth emailing your postmaster and asking if they'll either update their SPF record or make this particular SPF failure a "soft fail" instead of just throwing your mail away wholesale.

Ray