This document is obsolete. Please
refer to RFC 7001.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) M. Kucherawy Request for Comments: 6577 Cloudmark, Inc. Updates: 5451 March 2012 Category: Standards Track ISSN: 2070-1721
Authentication-Results Registration Update for Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Results
Abstract
This memo updates the registry of authentication method results in Authentication-Results: message header fields, correcting a discontinuity between the original registry creation and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specification.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6577.
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Kucherawy Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 6577 Auth-Results SPF Erratum March 2012
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2 2. Keywords ........................................................2 3. New 'fail' Definition ...........................................2 4. IANA Considerations .............................................2 4.1. Addition of 'Status' Columns ...............................3 4.2. Update to Result Names .....................................3 5. Security Considerations .........................................3 6. References ......................................................4 6.1. Normative References .......................................4 6.2. Informative References .....................................4 Appendix A. Examples in RFC 5451 ...................................5 Appendix B. Acknowledgements .......................................5
[AUTHRES] defined a new header field for electronic mail messages that presents the results of a message authentication effort in a machine-readable format. That Request for Comments created a registry of results for a few message authentication mechanisms, one of which was the Sender Policy Framework [SPF]. The registry contains one entry that is inconsistent with the latter specification, which was noted in an erratum [ERR2617] filed with the RFC Editor. This memo updates the IANA registries accordingly.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [KEYWORDS].
The new "fail" result, replacing the existing "hardfail" result for [SPF] (and thus also for [SENDER-ID]) has the same definition for "hardfail" that was used in Section 2.4.2 of [AUTHRES], namely:
This client is explicitly not authorized to inject or relay mail using the sender's DNS domain.
IANA has amended the Email Authentication Methods and Email Authentication Result Names registries, both in the Email Authentication Parameters group, by adding to each a column called "Status" that will indicate for each entry its current status. Legal values for these columns are as follows:
active: The entry is in current use.
deprecated: The entry is no longer in current use.
New registrations to either table MUST specify one of these values.
All existing entries, except as specified below, are to be noted as "active" as of publication of this memo.
[AUTHRES] listed "hardfail" as the result to be used when a message fails an [SPF] evaluation. However, this latter specification used the string "fail" to denote such failures.
Therefore, IANA has marked "hardfail" in the Email Authentication Result Names registry as "deprecated" and amended the "fail" entry as follows:
This memo corrects a registry error. It is possible that older implementations will not recognize or use the corrected entry. Thus, implementers are advised to support both result strings for some period of time. However, it is known that some implementations are already using the SPF-defined result string.
It should be noted that this update also applies to the examples in [AUTHRES], specifically the one in Appendix B.5. The error there [ERR2818] is not corrected by this update, which only deals with the normative portions of that specification and the related IANA registrations. However, it is assumed one could easily see what needs to be corrected there.
Corrected examples will be included in a full update to [AUTHRES] at some future time.