On Monday 22 Nov 2004 12:57, John Peacock wrote: > I have to say that this is completely daft (IMNSHO). This is yet another > precarious layer to the house of cards that people have made DNS (c.f. all > the arguments about SPF), for no good reason. The mere presence of a cache > does not mean that this is an appropriate usage for DNS. > [snip] > <quote>DNS is intended to be used as a distributed database;</quote>
I'll agree that "we want to cache data => DNS" is a daft argument, but I'd equally take umbrage with your 2nd statement (allowing that I may be reading it in an overly selective fashion). Surely the _primary_ purpose of DNS is to hold the publicly needed administrative information about a domain - and I don't see why SPF in its core (v1) form is a mis-use of DNS as such - it's a complement to the MX record and the purpose fits with the original model of DNS records even if it wasn't actually thought of back then (reverse MX records never really took off, did they). The fact DNS is a distributed database is an accident of the implementation requirements of the core problem, which was making authoritative admin info about domains available to anyone who might need it whenever they might need it. Mixing the essential and the incidental problems is misuse - or rather exploiting the solution to an incidental problem is foolhardy, but extending the essence of the solution to the original problem is expanding the core without distorting purpose IMHO. Other arguments about how wise it is to publish valid usernames I'll leave to others - I just reject bad recipients at SMTP stage now but appreciate not everyone will want to do the same. Cheers -- Tim
