spf-discuss
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Re: Summary: Current state of SPF

2004-01-29 09:34:25
On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 03:54:23PM +0000, Wechsler wrote:

Extensibility:

* http://spf.pobox.com/mechanisms.html states that third party 
mechanisms and modifiers are permitted.

* Unknown mechanisms will cause 'unknown' results IF the parsing of an 
SPF record gets that far without reaching a result.
This is a defined and accepted behaviour of the specification.

Maybe it's just me misinterpreting this.  I read it as:

If I reach an extension that is not implemented by me
then the end result is an 'unknown'.

To me, an unknown is the same as "?all" or an absent record.

Then I read the following:

* 'PGP' and 'Habeas' are proposed as mechanisms (but have undefined 
syntax as yet). Therefore we can imagine an example of:

v=spf1 +a/24 +mx +pgp -all

and I interpret this as:

Is_the_mail_coming_from_the_/24 ? return accept : continue_parsing
Is_the_mail_coming_from_the_MX  ? return accept : continue_parsing
Unknown_mechanism              -> return unknown 

then when I read this:

In the normal case, mail will be sent from the home /24 subnet or the 
home mailserver (perhaps via SMTP auth). The domain owner undertakes to 
sign mail sent from any other location with a PGP signature. The default 
is -all as we assume that this example takes place in the happy shiny 
future when SRS is implemented widely.

I think: default is "-all"?  Not for me, because I return "unknown".

I believe that the behaviour of both pgp-aware and non-pgp-aware SPF 
agents in handling this record is fully acceptable.

I'm not making a judgement about this being acceptable or not, I just
think something is wrong (and again: it could be me).

cheers,
Alex
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