History
The idea to limit by IP address who could send mail using a given sender domain may date back as far as 1997. The first public mention of the concept was in 2000 but went mostly unnoticed. No mention was made of the concept again until a first attempt at an SPF-like specification was published in 2002 on the IETF "namedroppers" mailing list by Dana Valerie Lank (previously D. Green), who was unaware of the 2000 mention of the idea. The very next day, Paul Vixie posted his own SPF-like specification on the same list. These posts ignited a lot of interest, and eventually led to the forming of the IETF Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) and their mailing list, where the SPF idea was debated among a subscriber base that seemed to grow exponentially day by day. Among the proposals submitted to the ASRG were "Reverse MX" by Hadmut Danisch, and "Designated Mailer Protocol" by Gordon Fecyk.
In June 2003, Meng Weng Wong merged the RMX and DMP specifications and solicited suggestions from other programmers. Over the next six months, a large number of changes were made and a large community had started working on SPF.
Originally SPF stood for Sender Permitted From and was sometimes also called SMTP+SPF, but it was changed to Sender Policy Framework in February 2004.
In early 2004, the IETF created the MARID working group and tried to use SPF and Microsoft's CallerID proposal as the basis for what is now known as Sender ID.
After the collapse of MARID the SPF community returned to the original "classic" version of SPF. In July 2005 this version of the specification was approved by the IESG as an IETF experiment, inviting the community to observe SPF during the two years following publication. On April 28, 2006, the SPF RFC was published as experimental RFC 4408.
Read more about this topic: Sender Policy Framework
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