On Nov 14, 2008, at 8:29 PM, David Wall wrote:
Nobody with any experience or knowledge about email would seriously
suggest blocking mail solely due to lack of an SPF record or a
SenderID record or a DK or DKIM signature or an S/MIME signature or
an X-Herring: Red header.
Why is that?
It's not my contention that it could be done in practice, just that
the ongoing "discussion" about a "new email paradigm" based on
pricing email, email postage, etc. as a IETF standard to thwart spam
might have more than a technical consideration to its implementation
(which doesn't mean a programming language, but how you'd get
millions of server and billions of users to cooperate and adopt it
worldwide).
Because email is, fundamentally, about people.
People want to get email from their friends, their family, their
colleagues and their acquaintances. The vast majority also want to get
mail from companies they've bought from or expressed an interest in
(within reasonable constraints), organizations they're members of and
so on. And they also want to receive serendipitous mail from strangers.
Naive blocking based on lack of SPF record, lack of DKIM signature or
lack of X-Herring: Red header breaks that. And breaking that, breaks
email.
The vast majority (though not quite all) ISPs understand that their
role is to make their subscribers happy, and breaking email is not a
good way to do that.
Cheers,
Steve
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg