RE: Scope macro, alternative syntaxes, and use cases

> From: wayne
> Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 12:32 PM
>
>
> In <MHEGIFHMACFNNIMMBACAAEIBIDAA(_dot_)sethg(_at_)GoodmanAssociates(_dot_)com>
> "Seth Goodman" <sethg(_at_)GoodmanAssociates(_dot_)com> writes:
>
> > As a real-world example of the disconnect between the different
> > names, my
> > mail has a return-path domain of GoodmanAssociates.com, but my provider
> > (Interland) has their MTA farm under the domain RegisteredSite.com, so I
> > expect that is what they HELO as.  For this setup, _no one_
> > should ever HELO
> > with GoodmanAssociates.com, and any mail purporting to be from
> > me better not
> > have RegisteredSite.com in the return-path.
> Ok, yes, your situation is really not much different than
> mx.domain.tld vs domain.tld, which is quite common.
>
> The question is:  Do you trust Interland to not use
> HELO GoodmanAssociates.com from the MTAs?  You already trust them not
> to abuse your domain name in the 2821.FROM.  If you trust them, then
> having an different SPF record for 2821.HELO vs 2821.FROM isn't a big
> deal.  If you don't trust them, then why are you using them?
I do trust them, and they will always HELO as RegisteredSite.com no matter
what any user does (AFAIK).  However, they don't publish an SPF record for
RegisteredSite.com, so unless I can get that into my domain record with a
HELO scope, anyone who checks the HELO name for SPF will come up with an
UNKNOWN, which is not correct.  Meng has put forward a group of drafts with
a scope modifier to support Unified SPF, so how are we going to get there?
Adding another level of recursion as he showed is possible, but not a great
choice, particularly for new adopters.  It is unnecessarily complicated and
wastes MTA overhead.

As far as implementations that are out there, every single one of them is an
early adopter so a few changes should not be out of the question.  I think
getting SPF adopted would be well served by supporting Unified SPF in a
single TXT record.  Since unknown modifiers are ignored by existing
implementations, it wouldn't break existing implementations, it would just
require them to be upgraded to take full advantage of the scope modifier.

If we do implement the Unified SPF, it seems a poor choice to make all of
the as-yet-unpublished domains suffer in order to save a little bit of
effort for the early adopters, who could easily deal with the changes.

--

Seth Goodman