In <20040328035322(_dot_)GA45563(_at_)Space(_dot_)Net> Markus Stumpf
<maex-lists-email-ietf-mxcomp(_at_)Space(_dot_)Net> writes:
On Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 03:36:21PM -0600, Gordon Fecyk wrote:
It's happening right now. Meng should pat himself on the
back for a great
marketing campaign but ultimately, they decided.
Meng produced a lot of working code, and listened to what many other
people said. SPF didn't gain it's current popularity by marketing.
It is the leading designated sender system because of the work of many
many people working on many different parts of the problem.
Just because we are engineers does not mean that Marketing is not
going to be critically important for our success. Don't knock
marketting, it is a very valuable asset.
This is why I would really like it if we could work a way round to
call whatever end up with either SPF or Caller-Id. The CallerID
name is an amazingly good piece of communication, it brings the
idea right home to the journalist or non-tech reader. It also set
exactly the right level of expectations. CallerID did not end
junk telesales calls, but it did help tell you when it really
was aunt Meg and not another pest.
We realized that people would publish SPF records, just to make a
public statement by the domain owners that they want to protect their
brand names and good reputation. This has benefits even if few people
are actually checking the SPF records.
Actually there seem to be quite a few people checking now.
I think that this is a good omen for MARID. It tells me that if we
deliver the spec in August there will be takeup.
With this in mind, we was decided that we needed to pay *very* close
attention to making it as easy as possible for people to publish SPF
records, and for those SPF records to require minimal maintenance.
Hence the creation of the 'mx', 'ptr' and 'include' mechanisms, and
the "SPF wizards" web pages which help people create SPF records.
And that was the right design choice for SPF given that it did not have
the IETF imprimatur behind it.
But that is not the right strategy for MARID. The constituency we
talk to is much more likely to believe that less is more. The principle
that we should avoid situations where we end up with inconsistent
configurations is a good one, but that should still be possible within
a minimalist approach.
Phill