I’d be happy if email systems would recognize SPF for deliverability. I’d be happier if they’d block emails when published SPF records don’t match the sender. I’d be happy if Outlook would apply my rules *before* moving stuff to the Junk Mail folder.

I’d love to have a flying car, but I am glad that everyone else can’t have one. I am the only person I would trust with a flying car – the rest of you bastards would probably crash into my house.

Spam is part of life. It’s part of a free internet. When a significant amount of customers demand a solution then one will come. At this point however the internet is similar to the beginning of the industrial age.

Back then there was tremendous discovery and implementation of thousands of new methods of production and no standards. Today, there are standard ways of doing things that are common to almost all production facillities. These methods and procedures aren’t enshrined somewhere, they just exist as the “best” practice forged through a 150 years of trial and error.

In 20 years computing and the internet will be radically different than now. Look how far we have come in the last ten years. When accessing the internet and programs becomes as easy as using a telephone then we will have arrived where we want to be. Right now we are still toddlers in the internet age.

I am all in favor of anti-spam measures, but something isn’t quite right in this case.

I’m glad Google is phasing this measure in slowly, rather than immediately deleting messages incorrectly identified as spam.

I think what is happening is:
* I use a forwarding service.
* Someone I know sends me email with all the wonderful “SPF” headers, and has a domain name has “SPF” all properly set up.
* My forwarding service forwards that email to my Gmail account.
* Gmail checks the “SPF” headers, determines that my forwarding service is not authorized to send email on behalf of the original person, and (incorrectly) concludes that my forwarding service is a forger, forging the original “from” email address, and therefore probably spam.

Is there some way to fix Gmail’s implementation of SPF so that I can use a forwarding service, and it correctly distinguishes between people who forge the “from” adress and people who don’t?

(p.s.: I suspect that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
doesn’t have this problem …
would it be possible to update Gmail to support it?
Perhaps by letting my web browser calculate the Hashcash values in JavaScript ?
Or at least allow me to calculate the Hashcash values in some other program and copy-and-paste them into Gmail?
)

They’re pushing SMTP authentication, which is a step in the right direction. I don’t know many Switzerland-based spammers though :D, but it will help keep the zombie-pcs out of my mailbox. There’s also a swiss ISP who proxies all port 25 traffic, dropping all spam-like traffic with a warning to the user (who can allow traffic from his connection, if it’s legitimate).

Of course, most of these spams bounce, so my catchall account gets all the bounce notices. Most of the mail that ends up in my box is these bounced spam notices. (Plus the actual spam that’s directed at my domain.)