From: Michael Hammer
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 3:48 PM
<...>
I would ask however, are we really willing to say that there is no
meaningful difference in terms of the order in which scopes are
evaluated?
I think the answer is yes. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but SPF
parsing currently works by evaluating left to right until it finds a pass or
hits "all". Even if it does find a mechanism that passes, the original
parser had to evaluate all mechanisms to make sure no syntax errors were
present, though I don't recall if that is in Mark's current draft. The
system was designed to give a deterministic result regardless of the order
of evaluation of mechanisms. If my interpretation is correct (I believe
Wayne is the expert on record evaluation), it shouldn't matter what order
the scope of modifiers was evaluated in, as long as all listed scopes were
evaluated.
Common sense tells me that RFC2821 indicates the order in
which we should evaluate some scopes. And I would hardly think that
there is sense in evaluating RFC2822 scopes before evaluating RFC2821
scopes.
Unless I am wrong about the lack of importance of ordering, this is an
implementation issue and has nothing to do with the SPF spec.
--
Seth Goodman