A new version of the alternate C implementation of SPF (libspf-alt) is
now available at:

http://www.midwestcs.com/spf/libspf-alt

Version 0.4 makes a lot of strides toward a stable v1.0 release

The major highlights of this release are:

* IPv6 bug fixes.  I think IPv6 may actually be pretty functional
  now.  Thanks to David Woodhouse <dwmw2 <at> infradead.org> for the
  help with this.

* libspf-alt has now been fairly heavily tested for being
  thread-safe.  It turns out that it was actually the BIND resolver
  library that was the biggest problem.  BIND4 is not thread safe, but
  libspf-alt now uses the res_ninit() and res_nquery() functions so
  that it is thread-safe on BIND8.  (I'm pretty sure the BIND9 usage
  was always thread-safe.)

  Thanks to Emmanuel Dreyfus <manu <at> netbsd.org>

* Libspf-alt now has a SPF_result_helo() function to explicitly test
  the HELO string, even if the MAIL FROM is not <>.

* Libspf-alt now has a SPF_result_2mx() function to support domains
  that have secondary MXes.  This is equivalent to the
  Mail::SPF::Query result2 functionality.

* The libspf-alt configure script now has a --bind-with=DIR option to
  let people use a different version of the bind than the default
  installed with the system.  This functionality was added by Emmanuel
  Dreyfus <manu <at> netbsd.org>

* There is now support for sending the error/warning/debug information
  to syslong instead of stderr/stdout

* There is now more documentation on the API.

* There have been quite a few API changes with this release.  I hate
  doing this, but I'm trying to get both a clean, stable, and
  functional API ready for the v1.0 release.  I tried hard to think
  ahead when I created the initial API, but hindsight beats foresight
  every time.

  Fortunately, most of the API changes are things that are either
  pretty trival, or are things that are mostly used internally and few
  if any applications have taken advantage of them.

* There are now a couple of simple example programs included with the
  distribution that should make it easier to figure out how to use the
  libspf-alt API.

* The code has been cleaned up enough so that it now compiles cleanly
  with the gcc options "-W -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes
  -Wwrite-strings".  On many systems it also compiles cleanly with
  -ansi/-std=c89/-std=c99, but there are too many problems with
  include file incompatibilities to distribute that way.

  These are basically the same flags that BIND9 uses.

* More DoS checks and limits have been added.




Comments, suggestions, bug reports, and complaints, are welcome!



-wayne