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Microsoft and the SPF community (Was: Report from the MAAWG conference)

2005-06-26 21:13:06
In <200506270543(_dot_)18605(_dot_)bulk(_at_)mehnle(_dot_)net> Julian Mehnle 
<bulk(_at_)mehnle(_dot_)net> writes:

Throughout the BoF, I had explained multiple times that, although there 
were some people in the SPF project's community who had fundamental 
objections to having anything to do with MS, the project as a whole was 
not against working out a standard in cooperation with MS, provided that 
v=spf1 records were left alone, but that MS had never really shown the 
desire to directly discuss the issue with the project.

Thank you for making that point.

I would like to stress that the reverse is also true.  While I'm sure
there are some people in Microsoft who have fundemental objections to
having anything to do with F/OSS projects, the people I have
personally dealt with in MS with respect to SenderID (Harry, Jim,
etc.) are out to destroy spam and email abuse, not F/OSS.  They,
however, work in the Exchange dept and they do not control MS's legal
dept, nor the folks who created the MS DNS API, nor the folks at
Hotmail/MSN.

Microsoft is a big company and like all companies that size many parts
have no idea what other parts are doing and it is not uncommon for
them to be working at cross purposes.


Then Andy suggested that perhaps the MAAWG could play an arbitrating role 
in achieving an amicable agreement between the SPF project and MS to 
commonly agree on and promote a new, post-v=spf1 record format that would 
be feature-compatible to both SPF and S-ID.  I responded that I could very 
well see this as a possible solution, even if that format would support 
the PRA -- as long as MS stopped to re-use v=spf1 for non-RFC2821 
identities.

I think this would be good and helpful.


-wayne