On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 01:12:57AM +0000, Julian Mehnle wrote:
Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
So I need to organize all these MTA quirks in a general table, by both
MFROM domain and HELO domain (and perhaps IP). This information would
be useful for other mail filter projects, so some way to make it
generally useful is a plus. Is such a table already available?
Without commenting on the other issues, this seems just plain wrong to me.
We (there is no "we") shouldn't keep BCP documents for how to best work
around standards incompatibilities in various software, or things will go
the "browser wars" way. That way lies madness. If some software behaves
odd, we should file bug reports or stop cooperating with it.
disagree.
Mail standards have evolved over time, and will continue to do so.
Interoperability is crucial.
"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
There is a place for standards.
And there has always been a place for the additional workarounds that get
things to actually work in the real world.
Stuart, your table makes me think of geekcode and (sorry can't think of a
better analogy) "warchalk".
I'm thinking systems that enable people to publish useful information about
themselves and about others, in an extensible but interlinked and machine
readable format. SPF is just a tiny fragment of such a language, and
illustrates how scarily complex the whole thing could be, but I think it
could work.
Think of it as part of the long-awaited next generation of reputation
systems that make systems of "Good...Bad (1..10) Confidence(%)" look
like so much D&D: rigid and inflexible over-simplifications (not that
there isn't a place for simplications ;)
It's the next logical step from chatting on a mailing list "I just
discovered isp XYZ does CBV with a strange twist". Automation is just
the next step, resistance is futile ... (sorry forgot my meds ;)
Looking deeper into my crystal ball, I see a Web2.0 coder encoding it all in a
xml schema called Description Of A Relay (DOAR for short).
Joking aside, I think it could be a good idea whose time has come.
Just look at all the various whitelists that each new wrinkle in anti-spam
technology inevitably spawns, and yet some of that information is bound to be
reusable: a greylister may care about the same info a BATV user cares about.
(insert good examples here)
Sharing and collating such information may be part of the way forward in
terms of both discovering new best practice and in propagating best
practice.
Regards,
Paddy
--
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
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