I woke up this morning with some Django server error mails in my inbox:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
…
'REMOTE_USER': u'…-guest@users.alioth.debian.org',
I did what one does in cases like these, I tried to fix the bug and mailed
…-guest@users.alioth.debian.org asking them to try again and let me know if
it works.
I get a bounce:
<Actual user's email>
(generated from …-guest@users.alioth.debian.org)
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<enrico@enricozini.org> SIZE=3948:
host … […]: 550 Please see http://www.openspf.org/Why?id=enrico%40enricozini.org&ip=2001%3a41c8%3a1000%3a21%3a%3a21%3a21&receiver=bq :
Reason: mechanism
I resent the mail to the actual user's address, and it went through. Job done, at least until they get back to me telling me that my fix didn't work.
Lessons learnt:
- Activating SPF checks breaks receiving email via a forwarding address.
- Activating SPF checks breaks hiding an email address behind a forwarding address.