Mailing List Archive

Who is Designated in SPF Record
I am having a little problem understanding who is suppose to be
designated in the SPF record. Is it:

- all hosts in that domain who are authorized to send email?

- or the email server that they are authorized to use?


kr


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Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 18:13, Kenneth Roberts <kr@ibn2.com> wrote:
> I am having a little problem understanding who is suppose to be designated
> in the SPF record. Is it:
>
> - all hosts in that domain who are authorized to send email?
>
> - or the email server that they are authorized to use?

All the mail servers the send mail on behalf of the domain.

--
Rob MacGregor
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
doesn't become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche


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Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
Kenneth Roberts wrote:

> I am having a little problem understanding who is suppose to
> be designated in the SPF record.

Rob already answered your question, and it should be obvious:

A receiver gets MAIL FROM you, allegedly. The only reliable
info from the receiver's POV is the sending IP, and your SPF
record when you publish a policy.

Therefore your SPF record has to permit all IPs really sending
MAIL FROM you, from a receiver's POV. You can permit more IPs,
e.g., if that simplifies your SPF record, but not less.

Frank



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Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
We initially set up our SPF records by listing the ip addresses of all
of the email servers that sent mail for each domain but our mail was
bounced.

Our email servers are multi-honed and NAT, therefore the actual internal
IP address on the server is translated to one of 3 actual public
addresses for outgoing mail delivery.

The WAN side addresses were included in our SPF records, but our mail is
failing. What have we done wrong?


Kenn

Rob MacGregor wrote:

>On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 18:13, Kenneth Roberts <kr@ibn2.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I am having a little problem understanding who is suppose to be designated
>>in the SPF record. Is it:
>>
>> - all hosts in that domain who are authorized to send email?
>>
>> - or the email server that they are authorized to use?
>>
>>
>
>All the mail servers the send mail on behalf of the domain.
>
>
>


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Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 21:53, Kenneth Roberts <kr@ibn2.com> wrote:
> We initially set up our SPF records by listing the ip addresses of all of
> the email servers that sent mail for each domain but our mail was bounced.
>
> Our email servers are multi-honed and NAT, therefore the actual internal IP
> address on the server is translated to one of 3 actual public addresses for
> outgoing mail delivery.
>
> The WAN side addresses were included in our SPF records, but our mail is
> failing. What have we done wrong?

Without the name of the domain, and one of those bounce messages (in
full) there's no way of knowing.

--
Rob MacGregor
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
doesn't become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche


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Re: Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
Frank:

Thank you for your response. I have provided below more information
pertaining to our SPF problem.

Kenn


Frank Ellermann wrote:

>Kenneth Roberts wrote:
>
>
>
>>I am having a little problem understanding who is suppose to
>>be designated in the SPF record.
>>
>>
>
>Rob already answered your question, and it should be obvious:
>
>A receiver gets MAIL FROM you, allegedly. The only reliable
>info from the receiver's POV is the sending IP,
>
What is the sending IP, the address of the email server or the address
of the host originating the mail?

> and your SPF
>record when you publish a policy.
>
>
We publish a policy that listed the WAN IP addresses of our multi-honed
NAT email server and our mail bounced.

>Therefore your SPF record has to permit all IPs really sending
>MAIL FROM you, from a receiver's POV. You can permit more IPs,
>e.g., if that simplifies your SPF record, but not less.
>
> Frank
>
>
>
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>Sender Policy Framework: http://www.openspf.org
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>
>
>


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Re: Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 22:31, Kenneth Roberts <kr@ibn2.com> wrote:
>
> What is the sending IP, the address of the email server or the address of
> the host originating the mail?

The mail server. If the recipient server is B and your server is A,
then server B is only validating the IP address of server A.

> We publish a policy that listed the WAN IP addresses of our multi-honed NAT
> email server and our mail bounced.

And the full bounce message would be?

--
Please keep list traffic on the list.

Rob MacGregor
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
doesn't become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche


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Re: Who is Designated in SPF Record [ In reply to ]
Kenneth Roberts wrote:

> What is the sending IP, the address of the email server
> or the address of the host originating the mail?

You need all IPs of hosts talking to me when you send
mail to me. You have already found out that these IPs
must be public IPs, not the private IPs behind NAT in
a LAN.

After that it depends, if you send mails always using
one mail provider, e.g., Google Apps, then you need
the sending IPs of Google Apps. They make that easy,
you can include their policy in your policy, compare
<http://www.openspf.org/Frank_Ellermann/Google>

Extending that example, maybe you sometines also send
mails directly from your "originating hosts" without
using a mail provider such as Google Apps.

Then you'd add the IPs of these hosts to your record.
Because you are in a NATted LAN you'd use the public
IP(s) of this LAN. If this public IP changes often
you likely use DynDNS or a similar provider for your
domain. Then you can write a:your.domain.example in
your SPF record, that covers the public address(es)
of your domain, IPv4 and IPv6.

Putting it all together (Google Apps and your hosts)
you could arrive at (TXT for your.domain.example.):

"v=spf1 a include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all"

If you have another provider for outbound mail use
another inxlude. If you have more than one provider
use more than one include. And if one of your mail
providers does not offer an "include" it starts to
get interesting - you cannot include something that
doesn't exist.

OTOH this is 2008, more than four years after SPF
was launched, mail providers forcing you to "guess"
their sending IPs are lethally clueless. Guessing
can be fairly simple, but when it's not maybe you
would prefer to find a competent mail provider.

An example how guessing in theory works, with your message:
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spf.help/6287/raw>

| Original-Received: from theibn.com (unknown [67.116.23.194])
| by cygnus.listbox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 29D4D93 for
| <spf-help@v2.listbox.com>; Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:34:18 -0400

Your sending IP in this case was 67.116.23.194.

Checking what names have this IP I find one name:
mail-1.theibn.com

From your message I can't tell which MAIL FROM
addresses you typically use, let's say it's
user@ibn2.com

ibn2.com has two inbound MX servers, cuda-2.ibnto.com
and cuda-1.theibn.com. Often inbound and outbound
services are related, but none of the 2*3=6 IPs for
the inbound servers matches your outbound IP in your
mail. Forced to guess with zero knowledge of your
network I'd try this:

"v=spf1 mx ip4:67.116.20.0/22 ~all"

Based on that ask your admins if they have 1024 IPs,
they will ask back what you are smoking. It covers
all IPs from 67.116.20.0 to 67.116.23.255 (I think,
better check this... :-)

Based on "there are cuda-1 and cuda-2 and mail-1, so
maybe there is also mail-2" you'd find that this is
the case, and a far better SPF record might be:

"v=spf1 a:mail-1.theibn.com a:mail-2.theibn.com ~all"

That removes the expensive MXs assuming that they
are strictly nbound, and never send MAIL FROM you.
The MXs might bounce, but bounces MUST use an empty
MAIL FROM, and you can ignore that for now wrt SPF.

Frank



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