Sender Policy Framework

On Wednesday 2004-12-29 at 14:00 UTC, the council held its weekly meeting on IRC. There was a pre-planned agenda. Chuck, Julian, Mark, and Wayne were present; Meng was absent.

The first item was the Chairman's report. Chuck explained that due to the holidays he had not yet been able to publish the prepared press release to PR Newswire for wide distribution. He also reported that, as per Julian's request, he had made the archives of the council mailing list public again. Hence the last agenda item was obsoleted.

The next item would have been the Executive Director's report, but as Meng was not present, the item was declared deferred.

As the next item, Julian had planned to ask the Executive Director to make the submitted version of the HSARPA proposal available to the council, but Meng had already posted it to the private council mailing list a few hours before the meeting so the item was void.

The next issue was the creation of a press release regarding the impending submission of the current official SPFv1 specification draft, draft-schlitt-spf-classic-00, to the IETF. It was commonly agreed upon that a press release should be made and that preparations for it should be begun even before the submission of the draft. Chuck and Julian suggested that a list of changes since the prior official draft, spf-draft-200406, would be good to have so the most important changes could be taken into account when writing the press release. Wayne admitted that he would indeed have to compile such a list of changes, but in contrast he did not want the press release to give any attention to changes in the specification, but instead focus on the popularity and activity of the SPF project. Chuck stated that he would draft up the press release in the following week and incorporate any input from Wayne and Julian.

Then, Julian reiterated his proposal for the formation of an official project agenda in order to encourage members of the project community to invest their time and work into efforts commonly agreed on by the project. Everyone agreed that it was a good idea and that Julian should proceed to work it out.

Following that, the issue of making the spf-help mailing list archives public was addressed, which had been forgotten during the previous meeting. It was determined quickly and unanimously that the archives should be made public and that Julian should ask Meng to do it.

As the final matter, Mark presented the first edition of his SPF Sender Authentication Deployment Recommendations draft (second edition here). The other council members noted that the statement on the "SPF vs. Sender-ID" issue should be more explicit, and perhaps even a bit more political. Mark stated that he did not want the statement to have a political dimension because that might come over as emotional and irrational. Julian proposed that, due to the fundamental nature of the "SPF vs. Sender-ID" issue, several alternative position statements be drafted and put to vote before the community. Some further discussion followed on whether the project being able to state to be working with supposed industry leader Microsoft was important enough to tolerate their behavior. Then, in order to resolve the discussion, Chuck proposed that Mark write up a few paragraphs of technical discussion regarding the repurposing of SPFv1 records for the PRA algorithm. This would then be included in a more comprehensive document. Wayne seconded that, but Mark and Julian did not want to follow the motion. Instead, Mark offered to draft an "SPF and Sender-ID" statement without touching the subject of PRA.

The meeting was then concluded at 16:24 UTC.