Maybe the IETF Won't Publish SPF and Sender-ID as Experimental RFCs Af ter All

Fri Aug 26 02:43:30 UTC 2005

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:

>
> John Levine writes over on CircleID:
>
> [snip]
>
> http://www.circleid.com/article/1178_0_1_0_C/

Some corrections to what is said in John's article:
  1. The appeal is against publication of SID draft (3 SID drafts, although
     only one is actually mentioned in appeal they go together) as experimental
     RFC(s) in current form. This does not imply that SPF draft would not be
     published by itself as article's title suggests (although it maybe
     delayed if there is another attempt to reconcile the differences).
     In article text John does not say that SPF draft would not be
     published because of this appeal, so I'm unsure why such a title...
  2. The appeal is made to IETF Chair Brian Carpenter. According to IETF
     system he can choose to have appeal decided on by IESG or can choose
     to decide on it himself (in which case his decision can still be
     appealed to IESG). So far he has not said if IESG as a whole will
     consider the appeal. In either case, saying that IESG received this
     appeal is probably not quite correct (they were CCed however).
  3. During MARID itself it was decided that new record version would be
     used (SPF2.0 prefix), which is opposite to what John says in the
     article about there being decision as part of MARID to reuse existing
     set of SPF records.
  4. Nobody knows how many records had been published exclusively for SID,
     but its probably lot less then for SPF. But I don't think maintaining
     records is such a big deal (rather having to decide what goes into
     initial record is a lot more of a problem) and it probably would not
     be the reason why SPF2 SID records would not published if separation
     happens.
  5. As far as last two paragraphs in the article, first of all appeal
     is being made after people already asked if MS is willing to make a
     change and they said no. And as far as solution to this that lets
     "Microsoft save face", it probably can involve using positive results
     of SPF1 records for SID but not negative results unless its SPF2
     record (which it not say that everyone at SPF "camp" would support it,
     but it is probably better then now). But I'd not be surprised if
     instead MS chooses to disregard IESG and IETF and proceed with SID
     even if its not approved for RFC, nor would I be surprised if IESG is
     afraid to say no to MS even when it knows this is bad engineering...

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net