spf-discuss
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Re: [spf-discuss] Politics and the Next Step

2005-09-01 14:12:01
Jonathan Gardner wrote:

MARKETING. We need to keep marketing. And the best way is grass-roots. Make sure you keep preaching the gospel on SPF. I think we need to do some effort to refine the message we convey, and to come to an agreement over how we are going to say it. I propose something like "SPF doesn't stop spam, but it is one of the key steps to solving spam." Or "SPF prevents forgeries." When we come together as a community and get on the same message and spread that message throughout the internet and society, we will be heard.

You have to look at this politically and not technically. What can you say to convince someone to publish SPF records that doesn't right now? What issues do they have? What can you say or do to change their mind? Think emotions. Think feelings. We have to change hearts and minds.

We should probably put someone in charge of leading the marketing effort and let them put together a message and a campaign.

We lack a volunteer to do this job.  Anybody...

TECHNICAL SUPPORT. We are doing a pretty good job here. I think we can still do a bit better. But I'm not exactly sure how, so I'll just be quiet. We must be vigilant and look for ways to do better. Do we have a "Director of Technical Support" to take charge of this? I think we need someone like this.

I think that to the extent we have one, it's me. I got deputized by Meng and then by the Council to run the spf-help list. I've also been making sure that queries through the web site get answered (thanks to the RT that Koen Martens provides).

There are other volunteers (thanks to the people who've been helping out, I've had less to do recently and that's greatly appreciated). I think we are in pretty good shape here, but any suggestions are welcome.

NEXT STEP. We have to move on to the next step. What is the next step? Reputation services. I wish I had time to work on this. I'm sure if someone took the lead some folks from our company would silently contribute to the effort. What already exists? What are their technical and political limitations?

Myself I see the next step as seeing what we can do with modifiers to extend the utility of SPF and integrate with other methods. I believe that as an envelope method, it makes great sense for the SPF record to be the place where efficient discovery of other supported methods could be done.

I believe that there will never be a v=spf1.1, 2, or 3. What we got is what we got. Best to figure out what we can do with it.

Reputation inevitably inolves heuristics. If you want to jump from anti-forgery to anti-spam, I think it's probably necessary.

I would like to find ways to do less heuristics and more deterministic things.

Scott K

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