Re: draft-mengwong-spf-02.txt

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:59:27AM -0400, Paul Judge wrote:
> Will others please comment on the suggestion to move forward with this as
> the base og the combined proposal?


Well, I've spent some time thinking about. On one hand, I think it 
is a good melt, on the other hand I believe it is incomplete, needs
some improvement in structure, and I am still thinking whether 
it wouldn't be a better idea to violate IETF standards and to move to 
a pretty formatted PDF document, which is simply much easier to read
and would "sell" better.


I also was going to write such a combined document, and I had the
following structure in mind:


- What is this about? Technical documentation only, 
  reference to asrg-rmx, who is working here, current drafts


- What to process and what to not process

  - We ignore header and body
  - We check the EHLO/HELO
  - We check the SENDER
  - Overview of SMTP protocoll and how our method
    fits into
  - Algorithm for tagging e-mails
  - Headers to be inserted in E-mails
  - Received lines
  - Maybe error message to be used for message rejection



- How to process

  
  - Fetch RMX description giving a "ruleset" of 
    methods to apply  or
  - primitive: One method only (IP mapping)



- How to find RMX description: Mapping to Directory Services

  - Why DNS? (Could also be LDAP)

  - Where to look in DNS:
    - Mapping of given HELO name to DNS
    - Mapping of given SENDER address to DNS
      - domain part only or
      - full address?

  - What to find in DNS:
    - TXT record or special RMX encoding

  - How to treat:
    - No record
    - Temporary not available...



- Authentication:

  - Primitive: Use the IP address as identity, TCP as 
    rude authentication method, proceed with IP-based
    authorization, weak but cheap, sufficient, available, 
    existing

  - Maybe: SASL/SSL authentication? Challenge Response?




- Authorization:

  - List the whole bunch of methods, mainly drop in Meng's 
    (I apologize, is this his sur- or given name?) draft here, 
    should be readable and easy to understand.



- Consequences

    which consequences does it have?

    whois ...


- Requirements

    - How to name MTAs 
    - 
    ....


- SMTP Details

  - Mailing lists
  - forwarding
  - ...



regards
Hadmut