spf-discuss
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Re: will resistant MTAs be fronted with commercial antispam gateways?

2004-02-11 04:02:40
Meng,

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.

You look at it the wrong way. Right now SPF is just a working draft,
yet it convinced 5000+ domain owners to publish SPF records, you
already have SPF patches against or plugins for all major MTAs, what
more do you expect? The maintainers of MTAs have to ensure that their
code has release quality and interoperates with all other MTAs which
means that they have to stick to standards. I'm sure that as soon as
SPF is finalized and gets an RFC number, the tides will turn.

(I myself am just waiting for Postfix 2.1 to be released which will be
Real Soon Now, and then I'll use Postfix 2.1 + SPF policy daemon on
all of my domains.)

I don't think SPF is big enough to trigger a disruptive wave but if MTAs
don't stay open to new ideas one day the wave will come.

They are as open as they can without jeopardizing the stability of
their projects. I guess you can only appreciate this if you have gone
through this (releasing several major and minor upgrades of a software
mass product) yourself.

Carsten