Table of Contents

About

Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) is a process that rewrite the sender address:

[email protected]

into

[email protected]

It is mandatory in order to conform to the SPF scheme when the emails are forwarded.

With SRS, an MTA can circumvent SPF restrictions by replacing the envelope sender with a temporary email address from one of their own domains.

This temporary address is:

  • bound to the original sender
  • and only valid for a certain amount of time, which prevents abuse by spammers.

Example

If you get a forwarded email with SRS, you should see:

  • the email rewrite
  • the added Return Path
  • a successful SPF test

Example from Gmail

Postsrsd Spf Pass

Reference

https://www.libsrs2.org/srs/srs.pdf

Implementation