I'll note a from the start that I'm dissapointed as well that IETF has
decided to close MARID, I was not expecting this outcome. However I do
not believe this is the end of standartization efforts of these
technologies as far as IETF is concerned.
The engineering issues are trivial and more or less irrelevant.
Engineering issues are never irrelevent and they are certainly not trivial.
I'll note that current proposal based on CallerID algorithm basicly is
flowed as far as IETF existing standards are concerned. And I'm not
certain Microsoft would ever agree to modifying algorithm if this were to
cause it to no longer be subject its CallerID patent application.
The problem has always been how to get ubiquitous deployment.
True. And trying to push through proposal that can not be deployed by
open-source community is not a way to go forward with the process.
You seem to forget here that 75% of MTAs in the world are in fact using
open-source email servers at their core...
The spammers have won this round. That has consequences.
On this I do not agree for several reasons.
First - neither SPF nor Sender ID are anti-spam technologies, they are
designed to provide better email security and anti-forgery protection, but
they are not the "silver bullet" to spam.
Second - the technology is not dead, we'll continue with SPF. It'll be
deployed (though admitedly it'd not be deployed quite as quickly and as
widely as it would happened were it to become IETF standard rather then
experimental RFC).
Those arguing that the ITU take over responsibility for Internet
standards will probably cite this result as evidence.
I'm somewhat sceptical about UN bureaucrats in general...
So I don't particularly see ITU as a solution in place of yet much smaller
icann bureaucracy or non-bureaucratic ietf (which may well not be the
"perfect" standards organization but certainly comes much closer to
representing interests of individual internet users then ISO or OASIS
which are designed to provide forum of standartization primarily only for
large organizations)
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net