Due to the fact that we released statements in two separate messages,
there seems to be some confusion on how we intend this working group to
proceed on Sender ID.
First, the PRA document is not being dropped. Instead, we are
proceeding with a document set that includes a non-encumbered (as far
as we know) scope, "mailfrom", in addition to the "pra" scope. As we
stated before, the objection to PRA is based on questions of deployment
caused by incompatibilities with open source licenses. However, there
were also a significant number for responses from participants stating
that they had no such deployment issues.
Second, it does not make sense to discuss alternatives to PRA if those
alternatives may be reasonably inferred to be covered by the patent
application (though not necessarily the license) since this working
group does not wish to discount Microsoft's patent application. And
since we do not know the specific claims of the patent application,
construction of such an alternative would need to take into account a
few things we do know:
1. The patent application covers at least -core and -pra in
combination. There is no reason to think that Microsoft's application
is limited to the technology in these two drafts.
2. It does not cover MAIL FROM because this question has been
specifically asked of Microsoft.
3. The algorithm in -pra has changed through multiple revisions of
the draft(s).
This would seem to at least exclude any scopes that use 2822 headers to
identify the party most recently responsible for injecting the message.
We hope to have a schedule as soon as possible.
-andy