On Feb 10, 2004, at 3:38 PM, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
Exchange is not known for its antispam capabilities, so practical
people
just put a Unix MTA in front of it.
We've been trying to convince Unix MTA authors to incorporate SPF
support. This effort has met with limited success. This worries me
because down that road is a future where practical people just put a
commercial antispam email gateway in front of their Unix MTAs.
<disclaimer>I am an author of a commercial MTA that implements
SPF.</disclaimer>
I think it's just a matter of time, and there's no way to rush it. If
anything commercial adoption will speed along the OSS adoption, as
people who do not want to pay for a commercial solution look to how
they can use the same feature set. The commercial firewall market has
(it seems) driven a great number of developments in ipfw/ipfilter.
A particular reason for aggressive adoption by anti-spam companies
versus the 'Big 4', btw is 2-fold in my opinion:
o Anti-spam companies focus on building strong anti-spam products,
whereas MTA developers have a slew of other features to be concerned
about. Your focus is not necessarily their focus.
o Companies see new technologies as a competitive advantage. I don't
think that any of the 'Big 4' feel they need to innovate to stay
competitive in the marketspace. For one, their is no commercial
interest driving them (excepting sendmail), second they already have a
large and dedicated user base. They only need to listen to their
users.
I also think that pushing for direct incorporation is probably not a
winning strategy at this moment. With SPF in it's infancy, an
unpublished RFC, and a young reference implementation, I think that MTA
maintainers will be justifiably skeptical over whether to incorporate
SPF into the core of their application. Not that the goal of direct
incorporation should be ditched, just that writing quality
plugins/extensions/patches/milters is a good way of encouraging use.
Once adoption rates pick up, the standard matures, users start asking
for it to be brought into the core, and the whole deal is banged on for
a while, incorporation seems more likely.
There's also a bit of a 'my way or the highway' attitude floating
around this list. That can be really counterproductive when you're
trying to get your technology adopted or incorporated into other
people's products.
At any rate, that was a bit more than 2c, but not much.
George
-------
Sender Permitted From: http://spf.pobox.com/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
Latest draft at http://spf.pobox.com/spf-draft-20040209.txt
Wiki: http://spfwiki.infinitepenguins.net/pmwiki.php/SenderPermittedFrom/
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription,
please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname(_at_)©#«Mo\¯HÝÜîU;±¤Ö¤Íµø?¡