Re: [spfbis] A standards track document defining SPF

["Murray S. Kucherawy" <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>wrote:

> Now, since we don't have a way of contacting every operator of every
> domain on the Internet, even if you contacted those 203 people and
> found that they were using these features in a way such that they
> could easily adapt to elimination of the feature, that would in no way
> provide you with evidence that the features are "unusued".  Your only
> evidence is still your starting evidence, which is that the feature is
> used by a tiny percentage of the population.
>
>
If we're going to accept that these are representative samples, then
discovering that the 203 would be willing to adapt to elimination of the
feature also means we have to accept that the same is likely true of those
domains the survey didn't explicitly discover.

As you said, and I agree, the best we could ever hope to achieve is a
representative sample.  That logic worked for reaching the conclusions in
draft-ietf-spfbis-experiment, and I don't see why it doesn't apply now.

-MSK