warning to list

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 19:35 -0700, Z wrote:
> The "flawed" is your opinion. A whole lot of people disagree. Of
> course, one can say that SMTP is horribly flawed. Few, if any, people
> would disagree.

I said that the technical assumptions on which SPF is based are flawed.
That part is not disputed by anyone with any clue, and since you seem
incapable of understanding even the most basic technical explanation, I
gave some examples where even known SPF advocates acknowledge the flaw,
and try to invent workarounds for it.

You seem very confused, because in response to that you seem to be
arguing "No, those people _support_ SPF". Which was sort of my point. 

I also said that in my opinion, those flaws and the difficulty in fixing
them renders SPF completely unworkable. That part _is_ disputed by some.

What part of that don't you understand?

I'm not going to bother to go through your response in detail -- again
you ignored the technical points which you obviously cannot answer, and
bizarrely tried to concentrate on personalities. You even seem to try to
contradict your own previous admission that forwarding servers need to
be 'fixed', and now you claim that there is no flaw to be fixed.

Although you mostly perform an Ad Hominem attack upon yourself with your
own evident cluelessness and self-contradiction, there there are a
couple of things in what you said which I suppose I should address:

> > 	"if we expect it will take 1 to 3 years for the world to
> > 	upgrade, maybe we can take 1 to 3 years to move from
> > 	proposed standard to draft standard to standard."
> > 	 -- Meng Weng Wong
> > 
> >   
> Looks like a non-sequitur to me. What's the context of Wong's quote?
> It sounds to me like he's proposing that people adopt the method
> before it becomes a standard.

The word 'upgrade' in the above is used in direct reply to an objection
that SPF would be throwing away real mail until/unless the whole world
manages to 'upgrade' to do something like SRS. It's in a mail in which
Meng changed the Subject: line to 'migration strategy for "-all"'.

Meng has never to my knowledge claimed that SPF doesn't throw away valid
mail in today's world. Only the really clueless hangers-on do that.

> At the last count, there are almost 200,000 domains publishing SPF
> records, including  
> altavista.com, amazon.com,  aol.com , dyndns.org, earthlink.net
> ebay.com, gmail.com, gnu.org, hushmail.com , livejournal.com,
> mail.com, motleyfool.com, oreilly.com, oxford.ac.uk, perl.org,
> philzimmermann.com, sophos.com, spamassassin.org, spamhaus.org, etc.

Your list is extremely disingenuous. Some of those are domains which
don't ever send mail, and many of the others aren't publishing records
with '-all', so aren't actually asking people to throw away valid mail.

Either you're being deliberately dishonest, or you really don't seem to
understand what you're talking about. This seems to be a common trait
among SPF advocates, in my experience.

> You realize that you just called Phil Zimmerman, the spamassassin
> folks, and the google guys "dim", don't you?

It looks like I called whoever set up the SPF records for
philzimmermann.com and spamassassin.org 'dim', because they're actually
publishing records ending in '-all'. In this context I'll stand by that,
if those domains ever do actually send mail.

Google aren't dim though -- they've implemented DomainKeys instead, and
although they do publish an SPF record they end it in '?all' which isn't
actually broken; just mostly irrelevant. 

But I'm not interested in an argument about personalities. Some of us
actually have the capacity to think for ourselves and make decisions on
technical grounds rather than just following the crowd, so your
deceptively-compiled list of SPF publishers doesn't really make any
difference.

Since you obviously don't seem capable of thinking for yourself or
conducting a _technical_ discussion, I suspect this thread isn't really
going to achieve anything productive. Please don't bother to respond
unless you actually want to discuss the technical points instead of just
spouting names at me.

-- 
dwmw2