On Sun, May 22, 2005 at 04:12:39PM -0700, Bill Taroli wrote:
I accept the rationale for perhaps not using PermError for this --
considering your later statement that it might best be reserved for
syntax/usage errors. My compromise to (1) would be to instead consider
having NXDOMAIN result in SoftFail. This would raise awareness of the
problem without (presumably) resulting in the immediate rejections Fail
or PermError might. None seems to me to just be too weak in this case.
I think returning softfail is something the publisher doesn't
know nor wants.
I also think people will just plain reject softfail as they do
with fail. Granted, I can't back this statement up, it is just
a gut-feeling.
A domain owner looks at his options, carefully generates a record
and publishes it. (or at least: this is how it should be done).
When something suddenly fails (the included record is gone, for
instance), the SPF record doesn't reflect the publishers policy
anymore. There is a problem and we have a result for that. This
result is called PermError.
PermError used to suggest a 5xx error being returned.
The goal was to describe current behaviour, therefore I am strongly
against altering the current draft and introducing new, incompatible,
behaviour.
This isn't fixing a typo or a bug: it modifies the way all current
SPF records are to be interpreted.
Alex