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