Hi SM,
the examples you give are /very/ significant, because of the miserable
state of affairs that currently characterizes email.
On 27/Jun/10 19:32, SM wrote:
If you then go to RFC 2821 and you will see that it is a Proposed
Standard which has been obsoleted by RFC 5321 (Draft Standard). There
are implementations out there that are STD 10 compliant. There are still
a lot of implementations out there that are RFC 2821 compliant. I'll
ignore the differences between these specifications. Most people mention
RFC 2821 when it comes to SMTP. Do I implement RFC 2821 or RFC 5321?
People also implement any protocol variation they like. The Internet
is (still) driven by voluntary cooperation. Developing a protocol
requires a non-negligible effort, and the necessary insight can be
acquired from the relevant RFCs. However, deploying the protocol also
involves installing and configuring the software. The ratio between
required insight and effort gets much higher for the latter phase, as
does the number of people involved.
Let's try another example. RFC 4871 was published in May 2007 as
Proposed Standard. It was updated by RFC 5672 in August 2009. Do I want
to implement a specification that could be changed in two years or do I
stick to the Draft or Internet Standard for maturity?
DKIM's policy is an even worse puzzle. The impasse there is the
requirement to avoid mandating recipients' behavior, while describing
signing practices. Of course, relying entirely on the English meaning
of keywords whose effect is purposely unspecified, results in massive
misunderstandings, and someone proposed to downgrade ADSP to
experimental. (Would that affect ADSP implementers, though?)
IETF and ISOC are apparently unable to conceive an effective anti-spam
protocol _and_ to lead implementers to accommodating cooperation.
Possibly, a maturity level whose meaning is only related to savvy
discussions among experts --when not to merely bureaucratic concerns--
is not very helpful, even indirectly, for the wider mass of protocol
users who need to quickly gather the insight required to configure
their machines steadily but up-to-dately.
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