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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Internet Email Services Association ( wasRE: Why do so few mailproviders support Port 587?)
> > No, I am not suggesting a return to the UUCP model. If I > > was then I would have said that. I am suggesting that > > we apply the lessons learned from the BGP peering model. > > I'm skeptical that a model that only sort of works for under 30K ASNs > and maybe 1K bilateral peering agreements for the *really* big Tier-1s > won't scale to a world that has 40M+ .com domains and probably a million > SMTP servers. Well the way that I see this scaling is that you have a core of email service providers who are members of the Internet Mail Services Association. These core operators sign up to a multilateral mail peering agreement and provide email transit services for other operators. The next layer is the non-core email service providers who have bilateral mail peering agreements with one or more core email transport providers. They essentially relay their email through a core provider, or possibly, they use some credential provided by their peer in the core to connect directly to other core members. The key thing here is that there is some kind of contractual agreement between the second tier and the core members. If the second tier breaks the agreement, their email flow is summarily cut off. You can do that with contracts. The mechanism for email transport and authentication is something that other people can work out. I know that relaying will work, but may not scale. However there are ways around this by separating the credentials/authentication from the mail flow. For instance, the 2nd tier provider connects to his peer in the core (CORE A) and asks for a credential to send mail to another core member (CORE B). CORE A hands him a magic cookie. He connects to CORE B and hands over the cookie. CORE B validates that this is a legitimate credential from CORE A. Email flows. And then there is the last layer which I call the end user. Of course this includes many organizations as well as individuals. It could even include someone who hosts mailing lists, i.e. someone who sources large volumes of mail. These people never talk to the core providers and submit all their email to a 2nd tier provider through the authenticated submission port. This group is the most important group because the entire system exists to serve their needs. Note that a large provider like AOL would be both a core email services provider and a 2nd tier provider at the same time. The 2nd tier deals with end users. In fact, AOL will also be an end user as will every other company. It is more useful to think of the functionality here rather than trying to map specific companies into a specific layer. I think that most people will agree that the architecture that I have described stands a good chance of scaling to a global level. And if there are some scaling issues that arise, they should be able to be solved within the core, i.e. the group with multilateral email peering agreements. They may decide to put some hierarchy within the core to match up with geography on a broad scale. --Michael Dillon
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