In the context of SPF and its need for SRS instead of simplemail forwarding, a local sysadmin recently asked on our sysadmin mailinglist:

What is bad about remailing?

Fundamentally we're being asked to do extra work that benefits otherpeople, people who've chosen to break their own mailers for no actualbenefit. This is backwards, and in my opinion accommodating such peopleonly encourages the next lot to demand that everyone else clean up theirmesses.

Apart from that:

• remailing requires additional software and configuration,

; cat Makefilefoo : /tmp/bar	touch foo; mkdir /tmp/bar; maketouch foo; make`foo' is up to date.; touch /tmp/bar/t; make`foo' is up to date.; gmaketouch foo

As ' make -ndd ' shows, for some reason Solaris 8's version of makedecides that directories always have a timestamp of 0. It knows thatthey exist, because if you remove /tmp/bar it complains aboutit.

Any Internet protocol change that requires everyone's participation isdead on arrival.

This often applies to would-be antispam efforts such as SPF .

(Superficially, SPF looks like it is an isolated thing that onlyinvolves the sender having SPF records and the receiver checkingthem. It's not, and the way it requires everyone's participationis illustrated by the need for the Sender Rewriting Scheme .)