Via eWeek Messaging And Collaboration: MARID Dumps Microsoft's SenderID

Via eWeek Messaging & Collaboration... MARID Dumps Microsoft

Excerpt:

Opinion: The standards group gives up on Microsoft contributions to the SMTP authentication proposal and instead suggests a hybrid alternative.

Andrew Newton knows an absence of consensus when he sees it, and lately it's been all over the MTA Authorization Records in DNS, or MARID, working group, which has been attempting to formulate a standard for SMTP authentication for months.

After some weeks in the "Last Call" stage of the process, it became clear to everyone that most of the participants objected to the portions of the proposed specification that had been proposed by Microsoft along with a claim of intellectual property rights and a royalty-free patent license. There were lots of reasons—some good, some bad—but all that really mattered was that the working group didn't like it.

So working group chairs Newton and Marshall Rose have proposed a compromise that uses parts of the spec that were not as controversial. Instead of relying on the Microsoft PRA PRA (Purportedly Responsible Address) algorithm, it allows the administrator to specify different "scopes" that correspond to the different message elements that have been proposed for checking. You want to check MAIL FROM? Go ahead. You want to check PTR? Have it your way. Want to check HELO? Party on.