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Re: [spf-discuss] The Appeal is out. So whats next for SPF?

2006-02-10 11:36:05

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Hector Santos wrote:

I've written this quite a few times over the past year and each time I
got into too many issues, that in the end, I decided not to click the
send button.  So I don't wish to get too deep into writing this message.
I will keep it short, focused and to the point.  Hopefully, when I am
done, I will click the send button. :-)

The appeal is out and reading in more detail, I have to give kudos again
to Julian and yes, my buddy Frank, in helping Julian put it together.

I hope we just don't sit around waiting for a decision.  Regardless of
the outcome, SPF must be prepared to evolve and move on.

If there is one thing that is constantly on mind about SPF is a lack of
a foundation for creating "Extended SPF" proposals.

I believe council has it on its agenda for next meeting to talk about
what is a future for SPF. I mentionted to some people my agenda already
and in my view SPF should first focus on issues with SMTP Session as was originally goal of the group and next steps should involve:

 1. Documentation on how to extend Envelope Sender address with
    additional information (i.e. what is called tags)
 2. Formal documentation of sender rewriting (SRS)
 3. Formal documentation on how to put signatures in envelope address (SES)
    - possibly separate doc on using dns to verify the signature
      and on how to do cause that to be done by means of SPF
 4. Documentation on how to use SPF to indicate of ip address should not
    be involved in sending email (SPF PTR, similar concept to MTAMARK)
 5. Document putting it all together that describes how to do verification
    of authorization during SMTP session i.e. Extended SPF

At the same time I think we should also start (slowly) working on next version of SPF that would have scoping system and other features that
will make it easier extend further.

Look it at this way using SMTP.

SMTP was first documented in 1982 via RFC 821.

By 1986, proprietary commercial mail systems, including online systems
like BBS hosting software such as our system, began the big migration to
providing SMTP/POP3 services.

It was quite obvious that RFC 821 was not enough and there were many
systems creating non-standard extensions.

By 1993, RFC 1425 (SMTP Service Extensions) was written to help SMTP
vendors offer, share and proposed new standard extensions.

By 1994, RFC 1425 was cleaned up and deprecated with the official RFC
1651 SMTP service extensions document.

Since then, SMTP really grow where it is today because of the SMTP
extensions document.

We need to do the same thing for SPF by creating an ESPF (Extended SPF)
Proposal mechanism.

I propose to the SPF to begin creating a foundation that allows
developers and administrators to create ESPF draft I-D proposals with a
SPF council process for similar working groups and SPF RFC document
creations.   The best ones, ones that become highly popular can then be
submitted to the IETF, if that's make sense.

I agree with, I think we should setup system that allows SPF documents to be submitted in similar ways to how Jabber is doing it with JEP documents (http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jeplist.shtml). Similar to IETF I think this should allow both for individual submission, but also should allow for documents to be done as part of SPF group activity.

Overall, this will allow people to seriously begin offing extensions to
SPF in official and focused manners and not get lost and side-track in
mailing list "How about this idea?" discussions where the few nay-sayers
might just enough to turn off the proposal writers.

I have ideas how to start this, but this is where I will stop now
because I want to press that send button now and not get too deep.

I think the above is sufficient enough to get the basic idea across to
the SPF council members.

Thanks

--
Hector Santos, Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com

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