Internet Engineering Task Force Co-Chair of Anti-Spam Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force, Yakov Shafranovich, weighs in on trimMail’s Email Battle’s article, Caller-ID For E-Mail Under Fire:

IETF: Your recent comment in Email Battles about Caller-ID is misleading. Both Caller-ID and SPF are on equal footing in regards to standards, both will be submitted to the IETF, and both are participating in the MARID Working Group of the IETF to combine their efforts.

Email Battles: The comments concerning Microsoft’s lack of standing were made by Boycott Caller-ID for E-mail, not Email Battles. They are reported as comments by Boycott Caller-ID for E-mail. In addition, we note that Boycott seems to be bent on promoting a competing technology. We write,”Efforts to verify the site’s whois data were fruitless; thus, we can’t help you untangle possible conflicts-of-interest”… a subtle way of saying we think these folks have a not-too-well-hidden agenda…

Your insight that both standards are on equal footing is timely. We were unable to find that information on IETF’s website, or indeed, the web. We knew Harry Katz claimed on April 5, 2004 that Microsoft would submit the Caller-ID specification in seven to ten days. But we never found evidence of subsequent submission. With no submission, we were unable to dispute Boycott’s contention. In fact, your comments triggered a re-check of IETF site(s). No luck.

IETF: The boycott people have been discussed on the SPF list before… However, I would like to elaborate on the IETF’s standards process.

Merely publishing an Internet draft does not start the IETF’s standards process. While the standards process requires a draft, many drafts published through the IETF are not IETF standards. SPF, RMX and others while published as drafts have not formally entered the IETF standards process at this point but are merely drafts. Therefore, from the point of view of an IETF standards process the difference between having a draft and not having a draft, is not formally significant.

As for Microsoft, they have posted a follow up message about their draft. It has not been submitted as you correctly mentioned. However, SPF has not been “formally” submitted to the IESG to be standardized, only as an Internet draft.

Additionally, all proposals that went into the creation of the MARID are being published as experimental protocols by my group, not as standards. The main point here is that all of the proposal authors, including Harry Katz of Microsoft, have agreed to give up their proposals in hopes of achieving a common standard which will be a combination of these. In this respect, SPF and Caller-ID, as well as others have agreed to work together which is something that is very important to achieve. The website in question argues that Microsoft is against standards, while their commitment and active participation in the MARID mailing list is evidence to the contrary.

Email Battles: So where does that leave us? IETF and Email Battles agree that there are a variety of experimental proposals for meshing authorization with DNS… And that disparate authors have agreed to work on a common standard all can use, which is yet to be created… And, hopefully, that concerning the MTA Authorization Records in DNS work, the current Best Practice for overworked admins is WaS (Wait and See).

Which brings us to the only point of divergence. Somebody thinks you should sleep with one eye open.

PDFs worth reading: