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Re: Re: Microsoft released more info Aug 30, 2004

2004-09-01 21:20:25
 
On Wednesday 01 September 2004 02:06 pm, jpinkerton wrote:

I believe you can now think of spf as being MS property unless you're
prepared to fight them :-(


Yes, we made a deal with the devil.

When Meng originally signed things over to Microsoft, a lot of people said 
that.  At the time, I thought they were overreacting.  Now I see they were 
right all along.

If so, this is very sad.


I just finished reading a reasonably significant portion of the relevant 
comments in the ietf-mxcomp archives:

http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/threads.html

IMHO, the two "successful" arguments for continuing with SenderID that must be 
refuted are:

1. Companies of importance, e.g. AOL, will have no problem with the SenderID 
license.

2. Anti-forgery with SenderID will gain adoption much faster with Microsoft's 
influence and help.

The rest of the arguments for SenderID were already reasonably refuted.

I doubt I will post to the ietf-mxcomp, but here is my opinion on how others 
might want to try to refute these:

1. A standard should be implementable by all, or at least most.  Even though 
AOL claims they can implement as a receiver without IPR problems, they should 
also be concerned about implementation of other receivers, because AOL is also 
a sender of e-mail.

2. But under Microsoft's control, which is IMHO not the spirit of internet 
standards.  In general I think it is not wise, nor consistent with the RFCs 
under which IETF supposedly operates, to create "internet standards" which give 
leverage to one competitor over **ALL** others, by "standardizing" on one 
competitor's license.  The larger question though is the greater good helped 
more than hurt?  IMHO, anti-forgery is not a complete solution to spam, and 
thus doing any action that would could stifle the diversity of competition in 
anti-spam, is very dangerous to the greater good.

AccuSpam is an example of a anti-spam receiver which may not be able to 
implement SenderID if it requires signing a license with Microsoft, because it 
is possible that Microsoft may one day view AccuSpam as a competitor to some 
anti-spam product from Microsoft and AccuSpam might not want to give Microsoft 
the leverage of an executed license.

If anyone wants to reference my post in a post to the ietf-mxcomp, then please 
do.

Regards,
Shelby