Meng Weng Wong, father of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for email authentication, and the man who negotiated with Microsoft to meld its CALLER-ID with SPF, creating SENDER-ID, just came in dead last in an 8-way race for five slots on the SPF Council.

In an election where just 35 individuals cast votes worth a total of 1283 points, Julian Mehnle walked away with the vote. Mehnle is a leader of the faction of SPF Council members that’s pushing to confront oversite committees over obstacles they think have been unfairly planted between SPF and industry approval.

As Wong told Email Battles late in 2005, he strongly disagrees with this course of action.

SPF Council Election Results 2006

Candidate Rank Total
Julian Mehnle 1 51
William Leibzon 2 98
Stuart Gathman 3 102
Mark Kramer 4 126
Mark Shewmaker 5 131
Alex van den Bogaerdt 6 151
Terry Fielder 7 156
Meng Weng Wong 8 217

SPF has been on many industry watchers’ sick list for some time.

In early January 2006, Andrew Newton, former co-chair of the MARID Working Group of the IETF, completed a five-day scan of some 13.2 53 million domains to determine SPF penetration. Newton’s scan indicates that the adoption rate for SPF peaked in June, 2005. He pegs the current number of domains that have adopted SPF at just 1.6 million, or around 12% 3.1%. Newton told Email Battles:

I think these scans do tell us that enthusiasm for SPF is dying. But that should be expected. Even SPF’s inventor, Meng Weng Wong, has stated that a crypto-based solution such as DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is the end-goal for email authentication.

Since beating a dead horse doesn’t look too good on anybody’s resume, perhaps Wong’s electoral washout was a gift. A hearty congratulations to those stalwarts still standing.

If you’re considering adopting SPF, you may want to save your time and energy to see how this fleshes out. How many times have we told you that?

Extended coverage available shortly. Watch this space.

Email Battles Backgrounder: