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Re: DMARC: perspectives from a listadmin of large open-source lists

2014-04-15 11:28:11
On 4/14/2014 8:35 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
On Monday, April 14, 2014 10:26:44 Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
I mentioned in another thread that the DMARC people did come to the IETF to
ask for a working group to complete development of the work on the
standards track.  This request was denied on the grounds that DMARC was
essentially already done, and thus the IETF had nothing engineering-wise to
contribute.  There were also too few people that were not already DMARC
proponents that would commit to working on it.

(And as I said on that other thread, I'm happy to stand corrected if I've
mischaracterized any of that.)

My perception (and it may also be wrong) is that anyone who claimed there was
work yet to be done was shouted down.

Given that the exchanges were on an open mailing list, I'm not quite sure what that means.

What I am sure of is that I've pressed quite vigorously and repeatedly, first on the open dmarc.org mailing list and then on the IETF DMARC mailing list, for folk to cite work that needed to be done and to develop group support for that work.

What I saw was some individuals suggesting some bits of work, but no support developed around it. (By 'support' I mean more than a few folk.)

Perhaps you can point to specific examples of this 'shouting down' happening?

What I also saw was some folk insisting that the charter be vague and unconstrained, with no concern for the installed base.


As I said in the other thread, I think the only reason it was perceived as
done is that the private group that developed the spec declared it done and
fought against any WG charter language that would have permitted changes to
the core protocol.    Based on that approach, no wonder it was declined.

Changes to the core of a protocol is the essence of de-stabilizing its installed base.

Writing a charter that permits de-stabilizing a substantial installed base only makes sense when there is a clear and compelling basis already known for needing to make such changes.

With respect to DMARC, none has been offered or has developed community support.

Writing a charter that permits de-stablilizing an installed base covering 60% of the world's email traffic, in the absence of a clear and compelling understanding of the need would be irresponsible.

Arguably, the mere existence of such a charter would be de-stabilizing, since it means that anyone considering adoption has an excuse to defer it to the indefinite future, when the IETF might get around to releasing a revision.

d/

--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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