At 4:22 -0400 5/1/03, Ken Hirsch wrote:
From: "Jim Youll" <jim(_at_)media(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu>
You're missing lots of issues, like all the sites that aren't at the end of
a whomping fast Internet connection... the big messages dribble in over the
slow link and local access is decoupled from link speed. When I put up my
first home Linux server many years ago, it was on a demand-dialed line and
it batched out the locally-gathered mail every 30 minutes.. the ISP was
an MX secondary for inbound mail.
I don't understand this objection. You can send to the ISP's SMTP
server at the
same speed as you send to another SMTP server.
Not exactly. My laptop can send mail to the in-house server at 10 to
100mbps. I close the lid and leave. The in-house server can batch the
mail out in 30 minutes, at 128Kbps over ISDN to the destination.
there's no benefit to adding another hop for the mail in the middle
of all this.
> Further, why should an independent organization's e-mail policies
be subject
to the wholly unrelated policies of an intermediate party?
Because the current system is broken!
Should we also
proxy all web serving and retrieval through the ISP too?
No.
Shall we ask the ISP
to maintain our e-mail accounts? Do we then have to trust the ISP to store
all these messages? What about privacy?
I'm only talking about outgoing messages.
Since there will be hundreds of thousands of SMTP servers no matter how
loudly anyone here complains, there is little point in trying to shout
against the wind in this way.
Yeah, yeah, nothing will ever change. The world will come to an end if these
regulations pass. People say things all the time. Then the
regulations pass and
it's no big deal. I'm more interested in whether the regulations
will work. Yes
there are costs, but there are costs to the current situation and to any other
solution, too.
Here we disagree. I think the trend is toward more of all kinds of
servers, not less. Teasing out e-mail may solve one problem, or if
the solution is not well liked, will just push users (and the same
problems) onto other technologies. Already people are starting to
have home media servers. Why would you NOT put e-mail in there too?
E-mail is not so special compared to the myriad other digital
services we now publish and consume... there is just this problem of
spam, and it's an incentive and accountability problem, more than
anything else.
How in the world can you regulate these bits? Can i ignore your
regulations? How about if I adopt a different protocol? When is
e-mail like instant messaging? When is it like newsgroups? Yes i am
thinking abstractly.
Right now the reliability of email is just so-so. And spam contributes to the
problem. I will note that hierarchically-structured systems (like
the phone system)
tend to be more reliable than N^2 connection sytems.
But the phone system is centrally controlled and slow-changing.
messaging protocols that are being reinvented every day, over this
messy, heterogeneous and evolving network, are not like that. I worry
a lot about too-strong controls being put in place too early. We are
in the first moments of this technology, and none of it is mature.
I would rather build protocols that support further evolution and
improvement, than rulemaking that could potentially freeze progress
at this point.
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