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Re: Email peering (Was: Economics of SPAM [Was: Micorsoft's SenderIDAuthentication......?]

  • From: william(at)elan.net
  • Date: Thu Jun 16 15:23:51 2005 
On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Todd Vierling wrote:


On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:


You're lost in the past.  Study history and stop repeating it back to us.



Although I agree that email peering is a seriously bad idea, I don't
think that the analogy to uucp is correct.



You're right -- I left out the routing table bit, which also existed some
time ago.  BITNET used the bitnet.links file; here's an old one still
accessible for viewing:

   http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/host-tables/bitnet.links

Similar concept, same scaling problems; it just hides the explicit routing
from the user (as would any modern "peering" system, presumably).




And just to add to it all, you might want to compare to another similar

system - FidoNet with its nodelist routing files.



Randy Bush is probably right person to ask but I have had a feeling in
1994 that its routing system would not be able to deal with all the people
that want to be connected to global email system. But of course we end
with everyone switching to internet and its no longer a problem (and
fidonet zones now are either smaller or same size as 10 years ago).



And also consider that fidonet does have hierarchical address which

makes routing decisions easier. With internet and majority of users

using email addresses in TLDs (or country SLDs which is the same),

there is no such hierarchy available.



So my opinion is that email peering is not workable as far as solution

for entire internet. But some of it may be of use in very limited scale

between certain very large providers as internal whitelisting system.



--

William Leibzon

Elan Networks

[email protected]