Re: Fully spam/virus filtered mail, and reliable outbound relay

In article ,
Leythos wrote:

> Actually, employees sending email from home should be using a VPN
> connection to the office. With a VPN connection it permits the employee
> to use any mail client the company wants, even Outlook and all of it's
> features.

If they really need to interact with the company's server, that's true.
But if all they want to do is put their company address as their sender
address, that's unnecessary overkill.

There are a number of reasonable ways to have perfectly valid sender
addresses that aren't related to the server that's sending out the mail:

* Employees identifying themselves with their company email address when
sending from home.

* Mail forwarding services that only provide inbound mail forwarding
(like alum.mit.edu).

* ISPs that provide outbound-only SMTP relaying (aka "smart hosts") for
their corporate customers (inbound mail goes directly to the customer's
server).

I know the developers of things like SPF are aware of these issues, and
some of the news reports say that they're working on ways to address
them. I just hope that they are addressed in reasonable ways before too
many sites start implementing these measures.

--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***