Dear fellow SPF-ians:
Last night, Meng and I submitted the Internet-Draft,
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-marid-protocol-00.txt
(should be published today or tomorrow), that defines the SPF record
format. It will now be discussed at IETF 60
(http://www.ietf.org/meetings/IETF-60.html).
If you read the draft, you'll see that other than a major re-write of
the text, the technical aspects haven't changed much. This reflects
the working group chairs' concern that the draft needs to maintain
compatibility with the over 100,000 (!) deployed SPF records.
This means that we have reached a turning point: Time for Chocolate.
We are past the design phase. While I'd be the first to admit that the
current design is not perfect - we now need to gather some real
experience, some real data, some real success stories, and some real
difficulties - before we go around another cycle of design.
This is a call for our community to change its focus for awhile from
abstract discussion, pure engineering design, and thought experiments,
and turn our efforts to making what we have work: deploying it,
gathering experience, writing about it, and doing all the extras that
are needed to make this thing practical.
After the chocolate, here are some things you could do:
1) Publish SPF records
2) Run SPF and/or Sender-ID checks in mail servers
3) Monitor how it goes and gather statistics
4) Write How-Tos, FAQs and experience reports
5) Help implement and bug-fix libraries
6) Build and run reputation systems
This has been the largest team design project I've ever been part of:
Hundreds of you have asked the hard questions (multiple times...
where's those FAQs and How-Tos?), developed ideas, given suggestions,
and spent countless hours on this. Now let's make it the largest
implementation team!
- Mark
Mark Lentczner
http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/
markl(_at_)glyphic(_dot_)com