Subject: RE: FW: Drive Towards Consensus

From: "Jim Lyon" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:31:41 -0700

Wayne writes:
> I think we could change the SPF spec to allow modifiers to be
> (optionally) position dependant and not cause problems for the
> installed base of SPF records.  That is, we could say that things like
> "redirect=" and "exp=" are position independent, but allow for new
> modifiers, such as "targetrep=" and "mailvolume=" to be position
> dependant.  So, it would be possible to say "v=spf1 mx
mailvolume=bulk..."
> and have the mx: mechanism marked up. 

I think that direction has some promise.  I'll need to think further.
(But don't expect much from me for two weeks -- I'll be tramping around
Scotland, with only sporadic connectivity and attention.

On the other hand, Hector Santos writes:
> Wayne,  adding unknown extensions before the final ALL directive will
break
> (create a SPF_UNKNOWN directive error) our current installed based of
> Wildcat! SMTP servers with SPF support.   Can't force people to
upgrade and
> it wouldn't be fair in general to all current SPF installations that
may not
> agree with an ever evolving "version of the month" SPF format.

Which means that Wildcat, although deployed, isn't really SPF compliant.
The SPF spec requires that unknown modifiers be ignored regardless
of position.  Regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I'd suggest
he fix that bug in the next release.

-- jimbo