--On Friday, 14 November, 2008 13:51 -0500 Al Iverson
<aiverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> This strikes me as unrelated to DNSBLs. Am I misunderstanding?
> How is this DNSBL-specific?
Al, and others,
While many of us are less opposed to DNSBLs in principle than
you or your colleagues may be assuming, we are opposed to
creating IETF Standards for anything that interacts with the
email environment without a relatively comprehensive
understanding (and good documentation) of how the new bits
interact with the rest of the system. One of the implications
of that is unwillingness to see DNSBL formats standardized
without having any protocol or best-practice documents that are
being assumed in front of us at the same time. If there are
failure cases, we expect to see descriptions of them and
analyses of either their consequences or how they might be
mitigated.
When DNS experts claim that a particular approach is unhealthy
for the DNS and give careful explanations for that, advocates of
DNSBL standardization need to evaluate those arguments and
propose remedies _in the relevant documents_, not just in
flaming on the mailing list.
When someone asserts that DNSBLs don't cause operational
problems with the mail system if they are operated according to
best practices, then it is reasonable for the IETF to require
that documentation of the relevant best practices be put forward
for standardization as part of the same logical package.
Moreover, when a DNSBL advocate claims that his ISP organization
is using best practices and not having problems or complaints,
counterexamples that indicate that they are filtering complaints
and/or that the supposed best practices are not sufficient or
effective are very much in order.
The purpose of IETF-wide review is precisely to bring out these
"that has implications outside the particular focus of the
developers" issues and force them to be discussed and resolved
before a standards-track document can be approved. Although
this one has been, IMO, a little more hostile than necessary (on
both sides), anyone who isn't interested in that type of review
should not be looking for IETF Standardization.
Put differently, some of us who might not be resistant to a
collection of documents that made up a DNSBL standard are
extremely resistant to getting documents piecemeal and maybe out
of the order of logical dependencies and get even more resistant
when people try to justify one of the pieces on the basis that
all claimed operational problems are someone else's fault and
therefore not relevant to the document under discussion.
Your opinion may differ, but my personal impression of the rough
consensus is that neither this document, nor any of the probably
followups, should be approved for the standards-track or BCP
until some fairly large set of issues are addressed in a
meaningful way. There have been a lot of suggestions about how
to do that, most of which I consider constructive, and there may
not be consensus about which ones of them are optimal. My own
favorite starts with a draft WG charter whose function includes
mapping out all of the documents needed to make a complete
picture; others may have better (or other) ideas. The next step
is probably up to the advocates of this document and, IMO,
further attempts to narrow the discussion or dismiss the various
concerns without either a charter or one or more new or revised
documents are not likely to result in the sort of progress you
would like.
best wishes,
john
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