North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Blocking mail from bad places

  • From: Paul Vixie
  • Date: Sun Apr 08 10:52:24 2007

> > ...and why aren't bounce messages standardized in content and formatting?
> 
> Jiminy creepers, why can't people run software that implements standards
> from the last frikking *millenium*??!?

because those are feel-good standards, with no selfishness hooks.  emitting
standardized bounce messages helps the internet but does little local good.
and indeed, in the previous fracking millenium, we did well by doing good,
but this is now.  my personal blackhole list has at least 20K entries in it
whose only "offense" was bouncing a joe-job back to me in non RFC 1891..1894.

the rest of the world will no doubt go on JHD'ing this pre-compliant chaff,
and eventually false-positive so much wheat that there will be no benefit to
sending any kind of error-mail, much less compliant error-mail, since it
won't be read no matter what it looks like.  there's an argument to be made
that we're already in that situation.  store-and-forward should be a priv'd
operation (like relay had to become), the universal message transport should
be synchronous end-to-end.  any errors must be reportable in real time unless
there's a high-privilege relationship with the sender that permits queuing.

i have an unrelated question.  understand that i did my time in the messaging
salt mines, i maintained a version of sendmail while eric allman was at
britton-lee, i wrote a book about sendmail with fred avolio, i started the
first e-mail reputation project and was the employer of eric ziegast when he
invented the "RBL" DNS format universally used today.  in other words i think
i'm qualified to think hard thoughts about messaging.

my question is, is there a network operations e-list that's like NANOG used
to be, someplace where routers and switches and routes and packets and ones
and zeroes are discussed, and where abuse policy, economics, morality, bots,
web, e-mail, ftp, firewalls, uucp, and bitnet are considered irrelevant and
off-topic?  i did my time in the messaging salt mines.  i'm ready to graduate.
-- 
Paul Vixie