On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 06:14:01AM +0000, Mark Delany wrote:
On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 09:18:40PM -0800, Brad Templeton allegedly wrote:
Or is it the hope of this group to research new protocols that would
require all people sending mail to have new tools?
I don't know about "hope" but is it a tolerable cost if it helps
reduce spam? Maybe. How about a less expensive scenario where all MTAs
have to be upgraded rather than all clients? Is that an acceptable
cost?
If the reports that spam costs USD 8Billion per year are even close to
the truth, it strikes me that imposing an MTA upgrade to avoid much of
that recurring cost is a pretty small price to pay.
Well, I would not credit a number like that, but in any event even
if it were larger, there is a question of what is practical. You
certainly aren't going to get all people to upgrade MUAs. And I
seriously doubt you will get them to upgrade MTAs. I mean face it,
people run around with old MTAs and MUAs that expose them to
computer security intrusions and viruses, allowing strange programs
to get into their systems, see all their private files, wipe their
disks and embarasse them in front of friends. They aren't likley
to upgrade because of an order from high that their old protocol is
obsolete. People who get lots of spam would want to get new tools
to avoide it, but we're talking about new work for the _sender_ of
E-mail. Many of which, believe it or not, do not get spam because
they have never exposed their email address, and don't have an
address guessable by dictionary tactics.
However, a far more attainable goal is to require those who host
mailing lists (ie. legitimtae bulk mailers) to get a new MTA. This
could happen more gradually. Sites start installing a new MTA,
and whitelisting their existing mailing lists but not all of them.
So most operators of mailing lists start seeing bounces, and want
a new conformant MTA.
While there are many mailing lists, the number of hosts is
manageable. A large portion are at Topica and eGroups/Yahoo and a
few other hosting sites. Legit opt-in bulk mailers would upgrade
too to avoid hassles.
A new ESMTP protocol would take many years to get deployed if
you wanted everybody who sends mail to upgrade, and even then
you would see many non-adopters until you started forcing the issue,
which would be quite contentious.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg