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

  • From: Todd Vierling
  • Date: Mon Jun 20 00:49:35 2005 
On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, [email protected] wrote:

> > > The thousands of bilateral BGP peering contracts are most
> > > definitely comparable to the email peering that I am
> > > proposing.
> >
> > Dude, it's 2005.  You can put down the X.400 crack pipe now.
>
> Why does fixing the SMTP email architecture by applying some
> lessons learned from BGP peering lead people to talk about
> X.400, UUCP, Bitnet, Fidonet and other obsolete protocols?

Because these protocols did EXACTLY the same thing you've been attempting to
push:  explicitly routed, trust-based-peering delivery.  IT DOES NOT SCALE,
and we know this because many of us have long since implemented it!
Personally, I've directly used three of the above, and still do run one of
them on my personal home server.

There are far too many SMTP machines already deployed out there -- we're not
talking thousands; here it's tens to hundreds of thousands worldwide -- to
reel it back in and make widespread, mandatory mail peering anything but a
bedroom fetish for high salaried security consultants.

SMTP is not perfect; however, it is the de facto standard and is widely
adopted BECAUSE it does not require any of this crap.  In the ideal case,
where remote networks do strive to keep themselves clean, it works well.

Blacklisting a remote network for its failure to keep a clean house is also
not perfect, nor are any of the other heuristic approaches being taken.  In
spite of their imperfections, these approaches are making an impact, and
pointing the blame where it belongs:  squarely at the misbehaving network.

You may feel free to descend back into the world where control of e-mail is
in the hands of a few, but the rest of us have given up the ghost on that
approach.  I do, however, know of a good clinic where they can help you
fight your addiction, once you're ready to admit the problem -- that's the
first step towards recovery.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>