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Re: [Asrg] per message databases, was antiphishing idea

2011-11-19 14:36:06
On 11-11-19 02:44 PM, Steve Atkins wrote:

As a thought experiment, if every sender offered a POP3-esque service
rather than sending mail by SMTP, it would require about the same amount
of resources as the receivers are providing today to manage that same
traffic, and that's not unreasonable.

It's called webmail, and I think it's true that you have to build out rather more infrastructure to support it than with a typical perimeter MTA/internal POP3-esque service. The security implications are rather different as well.

Note also that per message database _traffic_ would scale with the total amount of email (around 80-95% spam), whereas POP and webmail infrastructure scales with the ham.

The per message database queries in DNS wouldn't be cacheable whereas about everything else in DNS is. 3-5 orders of magnitude increase in DNS traffic to the authoritatives isn't unreasonable in the least.

With large infrastructures doing messages to the tune of 100s or 1000s per second, usefully doing DNS updates at that frequency (and timely enough to be there when the receiver wants to query) seem entirely implausible to me. Or you delay the email on the sending side to wait for the database to update... Ick.

A few thousand entries per second, with a hold-time of at least 4 days also seems a bit much for DNS to cope with - because _all_ your authoritatives would have to know them, and know them real fast, preferably before the email is sent.
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