Julian Mehnle wrote on Friday, January 12, 2007 3:29 PM -0600:
As soon as they let themselves recognize that they are tied to
Microsoft's DNS and mail servers not because of the technology's
superiority but because of Microsoft's status as a monopolist,
they will be free.
Until then, I really don't feel obliged to restrain myself just to
get the 400 lbs gorilla users aboard.
No, I'm not kidding.
That's too bad, because this 400 lb. gorilla is not getting off the
table in our lifetimes. Like a lot of other things, you get to
chose whether you'd rather be right or win, but not both. Waiting
for most people to decide that MS is a poor technology choice is
not realistic, IMHO.
In practice, the problems caused by using a new RR type far outweigh
the technically cleaner design.
Well, this is a structural problem mainly because of lazy players
like MS. As Frank pointed out, they won't be able to go on with being
lazy for long however, since other new RR types that cannot be ignored
easily are coming up on the horizon.
Anyone can wish that MS will not be able to keep doing business the way
they've been, but history tells another story. There's no reason they
can't keep on keepin' on for decades. SID was braindead before birth,
and it only has a few dozen records in the wild compared to a million
for SPF, but everyone still talks as if there is a real choice between
the two protocols. Convincing yourself that people will start caring
about technology and stop buying the same line of BS is at best
wishful thinking.
Once again, this is a chicken/egg problem. DNS servers aren't going
to implement it if they think nobody is using it anyway. So we have
to at least _pretend_ that the SPF RR type is important, OK? ;-)
No one has to pretend any further. Wayne went along with type99 in the
spec because of _potential_ DNS problems, even though that inclusion
will certainly waste far more DNS. It's now up to DNS software
maintainers to decide if they want it. I wouldn't be upset if they
didn't.
--
Seth Goodman
-------
Sender Policy Framework: http://www.openspf.org/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=735