ietf-smtp
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Re: bogus SPF deployment survey

2012-04-30 16:17:19


On Mon 30/Apr/2012 18:24:25 +0200 ned+ietf-smtp wrote:

FWIW, I looked at the survey before I saw John's note and decided on my own 
not
to take it. AFAICT it's intended to assess what SPF policy, if any, has been
implemented by the responder on their own host(s).

Correct.

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would care what SPF 
policy I
use at home (which is the only system I personally control and can speak 
about
with any authority), especially since for an email implementor that policy 
is
more likely to be the result of the need to test things rather than any 
actual
personal need.

That's deployment experience.  Even if it's a test system or a home
system, the way you deploy that protocol reveals your personal
preferences and attitudes toward it.  Since SPF is (or used to be)
somewhat controversial, I think it would be correct to take note of
how incompatible expectations are distributed.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Like most of the other people on this
list, I'm a developer, and as such I deploy things for reasons having nothing
whatsoever to do with my personal preferences for how an email server should be
run. Additionally, my experience is routinely based on feedback I get from
customems *when they are having problems*. It is a rare customer indeed that
calls up and says, "We deployed such and such and it is working fine".

IMHO, omitting to take the survey, you --in general, non responders--
just express lack of interest in SPF.  Am I wrong?

Yes, you are completely wrong.

If you want to ask questions of an audience of implementors, I suggest that 
you
ask them what kind of support for SPF do they provide in their products and
perhaps what they know (or don't know) about actual customer usage of those
features.

Agreed, if I had been more clever I'd have done that.  But then, those
who would have taken the burden to answer such more lengthy questions
are probably participating in SPFBIS already.  My questions are easier
to ask as well as to answer.

And that's 0 for 3. I am comprehensively well versed in what features our
product has, including the parts of the product I didn't write, because I am
constantly answering complicated questions about how to accomplish various
things using our product's capabilities.

Similarly, I am constantly receiving and assessing information from customers
about how well things work as well as what additional capabilities they want.
This is how I decide what features to add, remove, or enhance.

Since I think about this stuff all the time, it is trivial for me to
regurgitate some subset of it when asked.

But when it comes to direct experience with the machines I use for testing and
personal stuff, I make changes so often that I often don't recall the specifics
of their configuration. (Seriously: How many of the readers of this message
have had the experience where you pulled up some config file, looked, and said,
"What the hell is that doing in there?") And I most certainly do not remember
when I did something. And I rarely bother to assess how well some very
specific functionality is working unless I'm directly concerned with that
functionality at the moment or I've determined it is causing problems.

I can get all this stuff of course, but it's far more effect that talking
about product-related matters.

                                Ned

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