ietf-dkim
[Top] [All Lists]

MX dot RE: [ietf-dkim] TXT wildcards SSP issues

2007-06-02 20:29:54
Steve,

Could you expand on this somewhat?

We may be able to push the beastly wildcard issue into touch altogether here.


What is the deployed base for MX . ? How widely is it recognized? Used?

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-dkim-bounces(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-dkim-bounces(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of Steve Atkins
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2007 6:51 PM
To: Untitled WG
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] TXT wildcards SSP issues

(wildly off-topic content follows. Hit 'N' now.)

On Jun 2, 2007, at 3:34 PM, John Levine wrote:

But... if the only problem is wildcard records, and only a small 
number of senders are going to want to use wildcards with SSP then 
the obvious engineering solution is to have those small numbers of 
senders upgrade their DNS infrastructure, rather than wait for the 
far larger number of potential recipients to upgrade their 
infrastructure.

The problem is that you've just spec'ed SSP to use a 
protocol that is 
not DNS.  It's fairly similar to DNS, but it's not DNS.  I can't 
imagine the IESG accepting that in a standards track document.

No, it's perfectly compliant DNS. Really, it is.

It's not bind, though, and there's a fairly common fallacy at 
IESG, amongst other places, that DNS is "what bind does" 
rather than vice-versa. So, yeah, you're right about the 
standards document issue (were it me, I'd just spec TXT 
records and not mention wildcards at all).

I have a dns server that'll do internal wildcard records 
today (as do you, IIRC). The information it uses to do that 
will not transfer correctly over AXFR - but who, other than 
some subset of bind users, uses AXFR to maintain their 
secondaries, anyway? :)

The question of wildcards internal to names has been around 
for years.
Everyone except extreme DNS fundamentalists agrees that 
they would be 
very useful, but they haven't converged on a workable 
design and we're 
unlikely to do it here.

I think I'm a DNS fundamentalist, and I think it's a fine idea.


And, from what I'm hearing, those who are motivated to use 
SSP at all 
are mostly senders.

Personally, the part of SSP that I would find useful is "I send no 
mail".  I get mountains of blowback from spam sent with addresses 
subdomains of mine, starting with misscraped message IDs with host 
names on the right side, now mutated into various sorts of 
dictionary 
attacks.  I'd want to tell people that it's all bogus.

How is "MX ." working out for you? Not a rhetorical question 
- it's likely the closest we have to a standard for "I don't 
send email"
today, and is more likely (IMO) to be used by recipients than 
SSP, so it's an interesting bit of data.

Cheers,
   Steve

_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to 
http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html


_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to 
http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html