Sender Policy Framework

On Saturday 2004-12-11 at 20:00 UTC, the council held its weekly meeting on IRC. There was a pre-planned agenda. All five council members were present.

Before commencing with the regular meeting agenda, the council expressed its appreciation of the Secretary's work on organizing the last meeting's minutes and the Council Thingy.

As the first agenda item, Julian requested that for political correctness reasons an official name for the council, other than SPF Leadership Council, should be chosen. After short discussion, SPF Council was unanimously chosen as the council's official name. SPF Project Council and SPF Steering Council were also proposed but ultimately discarded.

Also on Julian's suggestion, the position of Council Vice Chair was created and permanently tied to the Executive Director's position.

Finally, Julian proposed that Condorcet voting should be used for council elections and more complex council votes. However, further discussion was quickly declared deferred until the more general discussion of future council elections.

Proceeding with the regular meeting agenda, the Chair gave a brief report on his efforts since 2004-12-04 in setting up the committee for the exploration of options for the future evolution of the SPF project. A mailing list had been set up for the committee, and the Chair expected discussions to commence in the following week. He also projected the committee to have come to first solid conclusions by about the end of January 2005. When the Chair revealed that he intended to keep the committee and its work private for the time being, no one except the Chair and Meng seemed to understand the real reasons for the necessity of that, so a heated discussion began. After about 20 minutes it was decided to later continue the discussion on the council's private mailing list in order to allow the Chair to present his reasons for the need of privacy freely.

After that, the Executive Director reported that he had been preparing a yet secret proposal to the US Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency (HSARPA) which he planned to submit on 2004-12-15 and publish it to the SPF community after that. The plan was to get funding for the prioritized implementation of sender authentication technologies — not just SPF — in the various e-mail software packages.

The Executive Director also reported that he had given a presentation on sender authentication schemes and a next generation e-mail architecture to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), and that he was going to help Earthlink roll out sender authentication during the following 6 months.

Next, the Chair proposed that a press release be written by himself and the Executive Director for a public announcement of the creation of the SPF Council and the election of council officers, to which the council unanimously agreed.

Then the SPF project's stance with respect to Sender ID was discussed. A lengthy debate began about...

• whether it should be stated explicitly that SPF and Sender ID be two separate things and that SPF can and should be used independently from Sender ID,
• whether – and to what degree – Sender ID and/or the PRA algorithm should be declared broken with regard to technical and/or patent license aspects,
• whether it should be sanctioned that PRA checks be done at the transport level and that SPFv1 records be reused for such checks,
• whether Sender ID should be implicitly considered a successor of SPF, possibly making SPF obsolete in favor of Sender ID in the future, and
• what exactly the points of a position statement of the SPF project should generally be.

After 30 minutes it was determined that the issue would have to be concluded on the council mailing list.

The remaining agenda items were adjourned, and then the meeting was concluded at 22:08 UTC.