Mailing List Archive

Migration problems and customer support problems
To: Sky.com customers,
Subject: For your information

To: providers and their technical staff
Subject: How NOT to do things


If you happen to know anyone at Sky (technical staff or management)
then feel free to forward this message.



Sky has migrated their email service for customers to google. When
they did this, they didn't update their SPF policy. This resulted in
emails being classified as forgery (or: spam) and Sky's customers thus
had a problem. December 14 I was asked to help, which I tried to.


In December: I called sky support and they said they would return my call.
Of course they didn't.

Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:50:50 +0100
I wrote to the responsible person listed in Sky's whois entry.
Result: nothing

Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:31:49 +0100
I asked for a technical contact at sky on both spf-help and spf-discuss
Result: nothing


In short: Sky has a serious problem and it seems impossible to help Sky
unless you happen to know someone on the inside, which I don't.


It currently is January 30th, six weeks after things started for me.
I've tried contacting them, and I've tried waiting patiently. Both
approaches failed.

According to what I've heared, email is still problematic for Sky.com
customers. Their current SPF policy is listed in this record:

sky.com. 1800 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:87.86.189.0/25 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all a:im3.sky.com mx:sky.com ~all"

The sending host (66.249.92.168 in the case I looked at right now) *is*
authorized by google's SPF policy, so that's not the problem.

Sky's SPF policy looks syntactically valid, although I can imagine that
some poorly written implementations barf on seeing "all" twice. That is,
technically speaking, not Sky's problem.

But a customer of Sky still looking for help after SIX WEEKS, is a problem.

Point is: should sky have made it possible to contact them, using any of
the three mentioned methods, they would probably have had less problems
and the problems they did have would have been solved by now.


I'm taking my hands of it right now. Sending messages has proven to be
ineffective, and phoning their non-standard telephone number is too
expensive for me. I rather do something useful or fun with my money.

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Re: Migration problems and customer support problems [ In reply to ]
Alex van den Bogaerdt wrote:

> sky.com. 1800 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:87.86.189.0/25
> include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all
> a:im3.sky.com mx:sky.com ~all"
[...]
> Sky's SPF policy looks syntactically valid, although I can
> imagine that some poorly written implementations barf on
> seeing "all" twice.

"It is used as the rightmost mechanism in a record" is good
enough for a warning - at the moment Scott's validator does
not flag sky.com's record as suspicious.

RFC 4408 says 'Mechanisms after "all" will never be tested',
and so "poorly written" is IMO actually a case of "broken" -
admittedly a plausible bug if it exists in the wild.

> That is, technically speaking, not Sky's problem.

Yes, they are free to publish two "all" for obscure reasons,
but it is very likely not what they really want.

Frank

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