On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 20:09, David MacQuigg wrote:
At 04:44 PM 2/18/2005 -0600, you wrote:
http://advogato.org/article/816.html
I think apenwarr makes a good argument, but he says that SPF is only
a whitelist. It seems to me that SPF is a whitelist (+) and a
beigelist (?) and a greylist (~) and a blacklist (-).
This article seems like the same old emotional tirade we have been
hearing for a year. "SPF breaks the world!!" "It's incompatible with
everything."
The above referenced article, not necessarily the follow ups (which I
have not reviewed in detail), has bothered me since I first saw it on
Jan 13th. Parts of the logic don't make any sense. Namely:
Problems with SPF ...
... SPF is not an anti-spam technique.
This implies that SPF _should_be_ an anti-spam technique, but then the
first sentence of that section points out that it's not:
Some people claim that SPF directly combats spam. It doesn't.
SPF attempts to address forgery.
This seems to attack the designers of SPF for attempting to address
forgery rather than of spam directly. In addition, just because "some
people" make claims doesn't means those claims are true or trustworthy.
Dan Rather can claim that a certain document about Bush's military
record is legitimate, but that doesn't make it so. The problem here is
that "some people" are making those claims, which is not a problem with
SPF. The actual problem may be that proponents of SPF have not spent
enough time marketing it as an anti-forgery tool and how that relates to
spam reduction, rather than riding on the anti-spam bandwagon. The
ideas behind SPF have nothing to do with that though.
Considering how active David Woodhouse has been on this list, and how
quickly people have piped up to set people straight about SPF's true
purpose, this seems like an odd thing to include in the article. It
really colors the tone of the article in general as more propagandaish
than it really is -- don't get me wrong, David's seem to have done some
excellent work on SES if the SES mailing list is any indication.
--
Andy Bakun <spf(_at_)leave-it-to-grace(_dot_)com>