I'm the one who pointed out over on spf-discuss that the Microsoft Sender ID
record wizard appears to be broken.
Unlike some others, I don't see it as a sign of conspiricy. Just a screwed up
piece of programming. Probably the result of a rush job based on incomplete or
bad information.
The things I noted:
1. The plain a mechanism doesn't work. If you click the box to get it, it
never appears in the final record.
2. Both the a and mx mechanism's encourage the user to put ipv4 or ipv6
addresses as arguments to the mechanisms. I understand this, though not
specifically forbidden by the spec., is not good practice.
3. The wizard prefixes the records with v=spf2.0/pra I understand that this
syntax is still very much under debate and can not yet be considered part of
the specification.
I'm not an expert. I may have missed things or misunderstood things, but I
think there is evidence that the wizard needs some healing magic :)
Mark Holm