RE: Re: Case-sensitive status

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank Ellermann [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 6:37 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [spf-discuss] Re: Case-sensitive status
> 
> > Would it break any known implementations to change them to all- lowercase in the
> > new RFC, just to be consistent with other things?
> 
> It can't, because ABNF is case-insensitive ;-)

That doesn't mean people did it right.  :-)

> There should be test cases in the
> test suite covering this point, in other words, it's mostly a question of what is
> better readable in 4408bis.  In the prose I'd prefer the mixed case "as is", but
> wouldn't waste time with arguing if you think that this is confusing. In the ABNF
> I don't care, lower case instead of camel case is fine.

I think there's a risk people will/did implement it verbatim, missing the nuance that ABNF string comparisons are case-insensitive unless actual octets are specified.

> That part of the ABNF apparently only affects the Received-SPF header field.  Is
> there any chance to get rid of this in 4408bis, e.g., with a pointer to RFC 4408,
> plus some "please use RFC 5451" blurb?  Any "erratum" for Received-SPF should be
> listed, I vaguely recall that this is the case, but this could be buried in some
> "things you really do not more need to care about" appendix.

I just replied to this on apps-discuss, but basically if there's some reasonable demonstration that the world has largely dropped Received-SPF in favour of Authentication-Results, then such a change should probably be fine.

-MSK