Mark,
<snip>
|However, I will not be including language that puts
|prohibitions on other uses of SPF records or the
|check_host() function. Standards themselves are open: You
|are free to put to use the telnet protocol, or MX records,
|or ICMP messages to any use you want, open, proprietary or
|otherwise. Of course, you may violate excepted usage or
|fail to be compliant with the standard if you do. You are
|free to stream audio at my computer encoded in clever ICMP
|PING packets, but my machine probably won't take it, and if
|there are too many, my ISP will firewall you. The SPF
|records described in this draft only authorize use of
|domain names in the Mail From identity. You can use it to
|check Header From, but it may not work. Similarly, you can
|send mail to the domain listed in my URL, but that may not
|work either.
Mark, I understand your position. The most important
statement is:
"The SPF records described in this draft only authorize use
of domain names in the Mail From identity."
In the circumstances, if you consider my proposed language
a "prohibition," which I don't, you still need to amend the
sentence to clarify the proviso.
The proviso is ambigous, allowing for a variety of
interpretations.
As an example, see Meng's comments in this thread, when he
writes:
|i think the intention of allowing functionally equivalent
|algorithms was to allow for receiver sites to perform local
|translation into their own optimized lookup systems, and to
|provide for caching and so on.
(As an aside caching is specifically dealt with further in
section 4.)
To avoid this level of ambiguity, follows is revised
language:
|Implementations MAY use a different algorithm, so long as
|the results concerning authorization of domain names in the
|Mail From identity are the same and are utilized for the
|purposes set out in this protocol.
Otherwise, simply delete the sentence. If people want to
use the SPF records for some other purpose, based on your
statement of intent, folks do so at their own risk. This is
implicit and including the sentence in issue only creates
unnecessary ambiguity.
John
John Glube
Toronto, Canada
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