On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 07:21:13 Dave Crocker wrote:
On 8/28/2013 5:24 AM, S Moonesamy wrote:
It's difficult, some might say impossible, to get agreement on
draft-ietf-spfbis-4408bis. I would like to ask each of you, and anyone
else, to provide your opinion about the following:
RFC 5507 primarily raises three concerns about TXT records:
RFC 5507 is irrelevant to consideration of the SPFbis draft.
Really.
RFC 5507 concerns approaches to design. However the SPFbis draft is not
designing a new capability. It is documenting a mechanism that has
existed for quite a long time, is very widely deployed, and has become
an essential part of Internet Mail's operational infrastructure that
works to counter abuse.
Internet Mail already relies on SPF and has for many years.
To consider RFC 5507 with respect to SPFbis is to treat the current
draft as a matter of new work, which it isn't.
No one is arguing that SPF's use of the TXT record is preferable. All
newer uses of the TXT record use a scoping mechanism (through an
underscore-based node name) to avoid all of the classic TXT record
ambiguity concerns.
My professional assessment of SPF is that there are many ways it could
have been designed better. My other professional assessment is that the
design quality of SPF ceased to be a relevant consideration, as soon as
it gained widespread traction.
Wide deployment equals very large-scale consensus and quite a lot of
running code. The IETF says it cares about those two attributes.
If IETF technical work is to have any relation to the operational
Internet, it needs to treat solid, real-world deployment as having
higher priority than theoretical technical perfection.
Yes. Please.
Scott K