Sender Policy Framework

On Tuesday 2005-03-22 at 22:30 UTC, the council held a meeting on IRC. There was a pre-planned agenda. Chuck, Julian, Mark, and Meng were present; Wayne was absent.

Chairman's Report. Chuck presented the press release regarding the new line of SPF specification drafts and SPF's independence from Sender-ID that he had co-authored with Julian. Meng suggested that more press contacts be added to the press release, and so it was decided to add Chuck as a second contact for the USA and Mark as a contact for Europe. No further changes were requested, so the press release was finally put to vote. Chuck, Julian, and Mark voted in favor. Meng abstained, explaining that he was worried that "any amount of dissension between the SPF community and the MS side" might confuse observant fence sitters and thus hold back adoption, but that his reservations were "no big deal". Due to the meeting having been preponed from Wednesday to Tuesday on short notice, Wayne was not present and thus could not cast a vote. As the end result the press release was formally adopted. Meng promised to distribute it through the spf-announce mailing list and post it to http://spf.pobox.com.

Executive Director's Report.

• Funding. Meng reported that the HSARPA grant proposal had been refused by Douglas Maughan, the HSARPA program manager, and that he expected to have a post-mortem talk for the proposal with one of their staff by the end of March. He pointed out that a response to the proposal to the US National Science Foundation was still outstanding and that one could not be expected before fall. Furthermore, Meng noted that he had the impression that Microsoft and Yahoo might be a potential last-resort source for funding the development of MTA integration of various sender authentication methods. Julian added that he was planning to seek funding from the EU and the German government within the next three months.

• Public Relations and Raising Awareness. Finally, Meng reported that during March he had given presentations on SPF and on sender authentication and reputation in general at several conferences to varying audiences, ranging from APRICOT, through individual ISPs and IT companies, up to IT-ISAC and MAAWG. When asked what he considered to be the point of giving all these talks and presentations, Meng explained that his intentions were to "educate the masses" on sender authentication and advise ISPs and organizations to deploy SPF. He added that he had noticed a specific interest among ISPs to shift from content-based filtering to sender-reputation-based filtering.

Motion: Commend Wayne for his CBR Online Interview. Frank Ellermann had suggested that Wayne be commended for the way he had handled the Computer Business Review Online interview. Mark made the motion, which was adopted unanimously.

At 23:28, Chuck had to leave and thus, with only three council members left, quorum was lost.

Project Website. Julian reported that he had worked out a preliminary plan for setting up a renewed project website, posted it to the spf-discuss mailing list for review, solicited hosting offers, and collected comments on requirements and suggestions for potential software solutions. After two weeks, he had presented first conclusions and recommendations. He reported that his original recommendations for requirements had went mostly undisputed, and so he explained to Meng that he feared that the shared edit access and independence criteria were not fulfilled to a sufficient degree by Meng's last hosting offer. Julian and Mark affirmed that they appreciated Meng's hosting offer but voiced concerns over the website not entirely being under the control of the council. Meng explicitly expressed his willingness to grant shared edit access for the entire council and to facilitate an external backup of the hosted website. Various possible implementations for the website were discussed briefly, and in the end it was decided that Julian and Meng work out the details by e-mail.

Due to the lack of a quorum, the Webmasters and Domains proposals could not be put to vote. Due to the late hour, the remaining agenda items, General operation of spf-announce? and DNS Load Issue, were adjourned and the meeting was then concluded at 00:10 UTC.