spf-discuss
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Results from the SPF council review on I-D issues.

2005-05-21 11:34:12


Alex van den Bogaerdt wrote:

On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 08:43:40AM +0100, Chris Haynes wrote:

Actually, to me this is not trivial, not if we want things to be clear for new adopters.

Agreed.

When I first came across SPF this notation really puzzled me. It took me several readings to realize that these single characters, which looked like they were minor operational prefixes or syntactic qualifiers, where actually _the result_ of a match to the mechanism they preceed. It was especially wierd because it is unusual to have the result as the first part of a syntactic group - normally the consequence is to the right of the cause (in LTR languages). That's why I think it is valuable to pick some word that makes their semantic significance clear.

Something like '-a' _means_ if the IP address matches the 'a' mechanism the _result_ of the attempt to determine the sender's SPF policy for this IP is 'FAIL'.

This I don't agree with.

"FAIL" if "a" matches
"PASS" if "ip4" matches

"Do this" when "that".

Agreed. I was thinking the same way and liked the ealier suggestion for "match-result", indicating that this character indicates the result if the following test matches (the sender).

Bill


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>