Mailing List Archive

The return of the spf-announce mailing list.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) News
----------------------------------
by Wayne, May 4, 2005


Greetings!

If you are receiving this email, it means that you have subscribed to
the spf-announce mailing list. Sadly, the last announcement was sent
over a year ago, and I am mostly to blame for this. I apologize. We
are attempting to restart this list, so expect least a couple of
emails to be posted in the next week or so.



If you are no longer interested in following the SPF email
anti-forgery system, please use link at the bottom of the message to
stop the emails. If, for some reason, that doesn't work, feel free to
email me.



The past year has been very hectic. Here is a list of some of the
things that have happened:


* SPF has been renamed from "Sender Permitted From" to "Sender Policy
Framework" to better reflect how SPF can be used to create policy
about how your domain is used.

* The number of domains that have published SPF records has grown from
an estimated 60,000 a year ago, to over a million today. (A factor
of 15.)

* The number of email checked against SPF records is harder to
measure, but my best estimate is it has grown by a factor of 10.

* Many new products use SPF, including SpamAssassin v3.0.

* The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created and then shut
down a Working Group with the task of tackling the problem of Email
Authentication. SPF and several other proposals were considered,
but in the end none of them were adopted by the Working Group.
Instead there was an attempted merger between, SPF and another
proposal called Caller-ID, with many changes to both systems. In
the end, technical problems with this merged standard, called
SenderID, caused the working group to be shut down.

* A revised SPF standard is now nearly finished, after much work from
two editors (Mark Lentczner and myself), and hundreds of comments
and corrections from dozens of people. The goal of this latest
draft is to standardize what SPF was like a year ago. While SPF is
not perfect, you can't keep changing a standard and still have it be
useful.

* In order to try and become more organized, the SPF community elected
a council to make decisions. One thing that the council is trying
to do is to broaden the number of people who can help out with the
advancement of SPF. This should make life a little less hectic for
some of us.


-wayne

----------
To unsubscribe from this list, or change the email address where you receive messages,
please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=spf-announce@v2.listbox.com