North American Network Operators Group
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Re: question on ptr rr

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Mon Feb 09 05:41:41 2004 
>buy a 1U, put it in a colo center (should cost you about $50/month) and
>proxy all your outbound mail from there.  stop thinking of broadband as
>anything other than a lastmile protocol between your house and your own
>piece of the internet core.

This is darn good advice. And to expand on it further,
it is time to stop thinking of Simple Mail Transport
Protocol (SMTP) as the way for everybody to send email.
For some strange reason we have managed to develop
two protocols for end users to use in talking to their
mail service provider (POP and IMAP) but neither of
them allow the end user to send email. One would think
that an authenticated session with an email service
provider would be the natural protocol to use for
injecting end user email into the system.

Imagine a world in which only ISPs run SMTP servers
which only talk directly to other servers with which
they have an offline relationship. A world in which
everybody hands over their email to an ISP for onward
delivery in order to get it into the system. A world
in which it is virtually impossible to send anonymous
or forged email without the cooperation of an ISP.

To get to this world we have to stop trying to fix 
the SPAM problem. Instead, we have to fix the email
architecture problems which have created the environment
in which SPAM can thrive. A new architecture might
not prevent SPAM but if it makes spamming hard to
do and has rate limits that make it very hard to do
high volumes of unauthorized email then most people
will not care about the small volume of SPAM.

We need to start with an Email Service Consortium with
a code of email server practices in which the larger 
ISPs agree to stop accepting SMTP connections from anyone
who is not in the consortium or a customer. This will get 
everyone implementing a set of well-known and consistent 
controls.

We need to add email sending capability to both POP
and IMAP so that eventually we can all block port 25
entirely from broadband/dialup edges. 

And we need to reinstate the use of SMTP relays in 
order for smaller ISPs to have access to the core of
the email system. 

--Michael Dillon