Subject: The real reason MARID won't work, RE: testing of MARID proposals

From: "Gordon Fecyk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2004 14:25:22 -0500

> [206.45.235.30] helo=mail.pan-am.ca
>    This guy obviously has no clue about designated sender systems and
>    what needs to be done to make them work reliably.

Lovely.  So the author of DMP doesn't have a clue about his own system, or
about changing his own records when he changes IP addresses.  :-) :-)

Excuse me while I go laugh at myself.  

<many minutes and one lung later>

*ahem* Ahh where was I?  Oh yes: The real reason MARID won't work is exactly
because of this sort of nonsense.  Lazy or forgetful admins who don't change
their designation records to match any server changes.

Oh sure we've all done such goofy things before, like delegating a reverse
DNS server by IP address instead of by name and wondering why a website loads
so slowly as the web server tries to resolve .3 [1] and such.  And this
probably would've come to light much sooner had any other people bothered
bouncing mail due to an incorrect record.

But because so few people bother checking these things and even then don't
bother to bounce mail because they think it's unreliable to do so, mistakes
like that will go overlooked for years after MARID's official publication as
an Internet Standard.  And then folks will use even more proprietary stuff
like DomainKeys, Skeptic and such.  At least those willing to pay the price.

And then archaeologists excavating an old burial site will discover
draft-ietf-marid-x on a scratched but barely readable CD (provided their
DRM-enforced computers will let them read it), along with some other
forgotten tomes with long forbidden words such as "Stallman," "Torvalds," and
"Tux."  Along with an old hard drive crammed with spam.  Their discovery will
be filed away with the Ark of the Covenant and other such artifacts.

Seriously, I can laugh at myself now, but I guess this highlights a need for
automated tools to simplify managing this stuff.  I'm sure Meng will jump in
with: "If you used spf with mx you wouldn't have this problem" any time soon.
But then we have the whole excessive DNS traffic problem again.

[1] I didn't do that, I swear!  I had to LART an upstream ISP who did that to
me in 1998.  "iStink Internet," as I liked to call them, fortunately died out
a year later.

-- 
PGP key (0x0AFA039E): <http://www.pan-am.ca/[email-masked]>
Sometimes it's hard to tell where the game ends and where reality bites,
er, begins. <http://vmyths.com/resource.cfm?id=50&page=1>