Yesterday, the IESG, the group that approves RFCs for publication received an appeal from Julian Mehnle to not to publish the Sender-ID spec as an experimental RFC due to technical defects. IESG members' responses were sympathetic to his concerns, so I'd say that a Sender-ID RFC has hit a roadblock.
The problem is simple: Although Sender-ID defines a new record type, called SPF 2.0, it also says that in the absence of a 2.0 record, it uses the older SPF1 record. Since SPF and Sender-ID can use the same records, if you publish an SPF record, you can't tell whether people are using it for SPF or Sender-ID.
Some corrections to what is said in John's article:
1. The appeal is against publication of SID draft (3 SID drafts, although
only one is actually mentioned in appeal they go together) as experimental
RFC(s) in current form. This does not imply that SPF draft would not be
published by itself as article's title suggests (although it maybe
delayed if there is another attempt to reconcile the differences).
In article text John does not say that SPF draft would not be
published because of this appeal, so I'm unsure why such a title...
2. The appeal is made to IETF Chair Brian Carpenter. According to IETF
system he can choose to have appeal decided on by IESG or can choose
to decide on it himself (in which case his decision can still be
appealed to IESG). So far he has not said if IESG as a whole will
consider the appeal. In either case, saying that IESG received this
appeal is probably not quite correct (they were CCed however).
3. During MARID itself it was decided that new record version would be
used (SPF2.0 prefix), which is opposite to what John says in the
article about there being decision as part of MARID to reuse existing
set of SPF records.
4. Nobody knows how many records had been published exclusively for SID,
but its probably lot less then for SPF. But I don't think maintaining
records is such a big deal (rather having to decide what goes into
initial record is a lot more of a problem) and it probably would not
be the reason why SPF2 SID records would not published if separation
happens.
5. As far as last two paragraphs in the article, first of all appeal
is being made after people already asked if MS is willing to make a
change and they said no. And as far as solution to this that lets
"Microsoft save face", it probably can involve using positive results
of SPF1 records for SID but not negative results unless its SPF2
record (which it not say that everyone at SPF "camp" would support it,
but it is probably better then now). But I'd not be surprised if
instead MS chooses to disregard IESG and IETF and proceed with SID
even if its not approved for RFC, nor would I be surprised if IESG is
afraid to say no to MS even when it knows this is bad engineering...
1. The appeal is against publication of SID draft (3 SID drafts, ...
...
2. The appeal is made to IETF Chair Brian Carpenter. ...
...
3. During MARID itself it was decided that new record version would ...
...
4. Nobody knows how many records had been published exclusively for SID...
...
5. As far as last two paragraphs in the article, first of all appeal
is being made after people already asked if MS is willing to ...
...i've determined that the spammers have no cause to worry that the IETF is
going to affect their businesses at all. in fact they're probably laughing
their asses off watching all this idiocy.
apparently, one way to stop spam would be to require spammers to live by
the official ietf motto, "rough consensus and running code", or by the
unofficial ietf motto, "let ``the best'' be the enemy of ``good enough''."