On Monday 10 December 2007 11:33, Michael Thomas wrote:
Scott Kitterman wrote:
Yes. And in my experience, as one of the leaders of the SPF project, the
biggest mistake that was made in RFC 4408 was to not be more explicit
about sender expectations or preferences. Many times I've been involved
in discussions with large recievers about SPF receive processing. I
regularly hear concern about rejecting mail, "Because the RFC doesn't
explicitly say that's the expected action".
So, from someone who has actually worked on that particular project and
not just had a lot to say about it, there is a definite lesson to be
learned, although probably not the one you were thinking of.
Part of the problem is that "softfail" and "hardfail" don't make
much intuitive sense. If we're going to use english terms, they
better be *very* close to the dictionary meaning otherwise they'll
be misconstrued. I, for one, was not in favor of english words for
the practices as it would force the implementor to actually read
what the draft said, rather what they could intuit from the natural
language definition.
Agreed. The larger problem is that RFC 4408 says receivers can use a Fail
result for filtering or reject the message (so it isn't clear what senders
were expecting). Having one determined set of actions for one set of
circumstances to be compliant with the spec is very useful in my experience.
Scott K
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