North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal at smtpng.org

  • From: Brad Knowles
  • Date: Thu Aug 22 18:36:44 2002

At 4:40 PM -0700 2002/08/21, <[email protected]> wrote:

 1. I want to create specification that would allow server operators
 themselve to decide what kind of verification they want, if you do not
 like callback, do not implement it.
If it's not implemented by default in the standard MTAs, then it is useless.

 2. Most estimate that up to 50% of mail system resources are used for
 processing unwanted email, viruses, etc. The amount of processing time due
 to new specification will be smaller then what has been gained from not
 having to deal with unwanted emails as much.
No, the numbers are more like 75-80% at many sites. But you're talking many, many orders of magnitude worse. You'd cause 99.999999% of all work done on all mail servers around the world to be nothing but waiting for callbacks to occur, and maybe some year an actual mail message might be delivered.

 3. The processing is server cpu resource, while sending email is bandwidth
 used. I'll give up some more cpu resources to decrease used bandwidth.
This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with bandwidth. You're trading a few milliseconds of latency for dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of seconds of latency. Try doing the math sometime.

 4. For last years cpu speed & hardware have been increasing at 2x per 2
 years and are more and more powerfull. Even if the initiative goes
 through fairly fast (I projected2 years, that is already too optimistic),
 it'll be another 4 years at least before its used, by that time servers
 would be 8 times faster!
The biggest thing that you need to work to eliminate in any heavily loaded mail server is latency. Specifically, what you tend to work hardest to eliminate is latency caused by waiting on the disk.

Now, disks typically have latencies measured in terms of a few milliseconds, and you want to replace this latency by another process that will have latency that can be measured in minutes, hours, and days?!?

So, just what kind of drugs have you been taking lately, eh?

--
Brad Knowles, <[email protected]>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E W+++(--) N+ !w---
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