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Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence

2009-06-17 09:54:55
Ian Eiloart wrote:
"Mail does not need...very good...reliability" does strike me as quite complacent. Sure, email is still useful for lots of things, but the spam problem doesn't just hit reliability. It also hits costs, usability, trustworthyness, and speed of delivery.

100% agreed.

In exchange for what are we giving up reliability now?

Nothing much. We need to have a clear path to a world where you can trust that sender addresses aren't spoofed. Then we can begin to build reputation services around tokens that end users understand (email addresses), instead of tokens that they don't understand (IP addresses).

IMHO, that trust can only originate from the mail domain. Cryptographic techniques (dkim, smime, pgp) may be used to ensure tokens have not been tampered with, but we need to know what domain is sending the mail. Unfortunately, whois records are inadequate; that's why we'll need reputation services.
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