On 12/1/2011 9:53 AM, John Levine wrote:
It was an IRTF draft. Then some people in the IESG asked why it
wasn't standards track. Fine, I said, let's make it standards track.
Then in IESG review, people (not the same ones) in the IESG offered a
variety of comments that revealed that their understanding of spam
management was stuck in the 1990s, and there was no way they were
going to approve this draft without a lot of changes that would make
it useless. So I said, never mind, and flipped it back to IRTF, which
is how it was published.
The particular example involved re-purposing DNS RRs for anti-spam, since that's
the most common way to publish blacklist information. And as John noted, the
document did not come from an IETF working group.
DNS work in the IETF is dominated by a collection of folk who demand quite a bit
of purity in proposed standards and BCPs. Repurposing A records is a long way
from pure.
The fact that this is a well-established mechanism and is essential to the
operation of Internet Mail is irrelevant to these folk.
The fact that they and others don't know anything about modern anti-spam work
was, IMO, secondary to the purity concern.
Also, folks should note that DKIM was an anti-spam effort and had no process
problems getting on the standards track.
That is, an IETF working group that was able to produce a consensus document got
through the IESG with no major problems. A document that did not come from a
working group /did/ have problems.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net