Subject: [spfbis] Too many includes!

From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:46:04 -0700

For the second time in recent memory, I'm being consulted about an issue
where some outsourced mail service provider has its customers publish an
SPF policy that has an "include:" referring to some name the service
provider has defined.  That include refers to a number of other includes,
which in turn contain as many "ip4" rules as will fit in an UDP DNS reply.
This consumes most of the ten lookups the overall limit allows.

I'm concerned that this is going to become a pervasive problem.  In offlist
conversations the consensus has clearly been "Yeah, don't do that."  I
wonder, though, if we need to say something more formal, be it inside
spfbis or elsewhere.  It seems to me that if we do decide we want to say
something someplace, we need to come up with "Don't do that, do this other
thing" and give at least one alternative to do the same thing.

Do we need to find some way to provide some advice here?

-MSK

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From: Scott Kitterman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 01:57:41 -0400

>Do we need to find some way to provide some advice here?

I'll be glad to add it to the FAQ or other appropriate place on openspf.org if someone wants to write something up.

It's certainly come up before. 

Scott K