[apps-discuss] Review of draft-marf-spf-reporting-08

[Glenn Parsons <[e-mail]>]

I have been selected as the Applications Area Directorate reviewer for this draft (for background on appsdir, please see http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/app/trac/wiki/ApplicationsAreaDirectorate)
Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments you may receive. Please wait for direction from your document shepherd or AD before posting a new version of the draft.
Document: draft-ietf-marf-spf-reporting-08
Title: SPF Authentication Failure Reporting using the Abuse Report Format
Reviewer: Glenn Parsons
Review Date:  March 12, 2012

Summary:
This draft is not ready for publication as a Proposed Standard and should be revised before publication
Major Issues:
This is a standards track document that is updating an experimental RFC.  And per the IESG Note in RFC 4408 that this is updating, there was quite a controversy on this 6 years ago.  As a result, I do not see how this can be published as a standards track update to the experimental RFC 4408 without some sort of discussion of the issues that led to the initial publication of the RFC 4405-4408 set.  This is especially the case since a 2 year timeline for deployment review was stated as part of the IESG note (and it has been 6 years).  If it is the case that SPF is stable enough to progress on the standards track then I would prefer to see RFC 4408 progressed to standards track before moving forward with these extensions as standards track.  Alternatively, if there has been no determination on SPF then it would be more appropriate for this document to have an experimental status.
 5.  The modifier "exp" is not the same as "explanation" in RFC4088.  If the intent is for this to be shorter, then a lot more explanation of that (including ABNF update) is required.
Minor Issues:
 3. Does the ABNF really have to be in hex?  That is why not ra instead of %x72.61
 3. The "include: mechanism" is vague.  Suggest adding a reference to clause 5.2 of [SPF] and/or using the same naming convention from RFC 4408 -- i.e., "include" mechanism

Nits:


** Downref: Normative reference to an Experimental RFC: RFC 4408 (ref. 'SPF')



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GLENN PARSONS
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