Hadmut Danisch wrote:
Because SPF has never been a technical invention. SPF is only a
public relations coup of a few people who were hijacking an idea
to bring themselves in front of the cameras and the newspapers.
I have spoken with several journalists who were intentionally
misinformed.
I'm sure it came as a complete surprise to me that the SPF implementation I
worked on for over a month was just a "public relations coup" and has "never
been a technical invention".
And intentionally misinformed journalists? Isn't that a bit redundant? Can a
person actually be guilty of misinforming journalists, or does it occur
naturally?
Readibility of SPF is based on wrong assumptions. It is based on
abusing TXT records.
Abusing TXT records? Is this your "irony and sarcasm"? I honestly can't tell.
Have you ever seen DNS records from inside? How DNS records are
encoded? They are not readible. They are binary encoded.
Using a binary encoding was thrown around a bit in the SPF community. There are
plenty of obvious reasons why this wasn't seriously considered. There are
already thousands of posts on why the TXT record is the best DNS record
solution in the near-term, so I won't get into that. And expressing SPF as
binary data in a TXT record makes a lot less sense than just using the SPF
syntax.
Obviously, the best technical solution would be a binary representation in a
newly allocated RR type. However, this is not a practical solution for at least
two more years. It really is too bad that RFC 3597 did not come out much
earlier.
If we don't stick to SPF syntax, what will remain of the SPF
hype? Roughly nothing. That's the reason why so many people
desperately defend SPF syntax against any progress. They try
to enforce SPF syntax, because that's all SPF consists of.
An alternative reason for people defending the SPF syntax might be that it has
already progressed through an extensive community discussion, testing,
validation, revision, and a significant deployment. That seems like a lot for
something that consists of nothing more than a syntax.
IMHO, if we don't come up with something soon, SPF will become the
defacto-standard (arguably, it already is) without IETF ratification.
We can make grand statements, facilitate discussion, and pass resolutions, but
if a large enough constituency decides that the IETF has neglected action, then
the void will be filled. I hope we have the wisdom to avoid this type of
embarrassing and shameful situation.
Michael R. Brumm