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Re: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt

2004-01-23 20:24:43
On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 21:21:15 EST, Hector Santos said:
mindset.  Quite frankly,  there seems to be conflictive old guru closed
minded attitude about the realities of the mail industry delimas which
perpetuates a dearth of interest to finally address the issues one way or
another.    You guys (speaking in general) need to listen and begin "opening
your minds."

What is often mistaken as "old guru closed mind attitude" is the experience
to be able to tell that *any* proposal in category X is doomed to failure unless
problems A, B, and C are addressed, and any proposal in Y has almost-certain
fatal flaws D and E, and so on.

Another common error is failing to understand the realities of scaling and 
deployment.
It would take me a short afternoon to put something up to test, understanding 
that
it was beta-quality software.  Getting everybody in my department moved is a
much bigger challenge, and migrating 60K users is a year-long proposition, and
migrating the millions of users of an AOL or Hotmail is a daunting issue indeed.
(Hint - how many extra first-line help desk people would AOL need to hire, and
what would the price be for that?  Is the cost of the migration more than their
current anti-spam costs, or not?  Don't forget to include burning 100M new
coaster^H^H^H^H^H CD's with 'AOL 10.0 - now with new anti-spam' on it).

TV ads.  Lots of them.  You'll need them.  If you don't understand why,
don't bother commenting until you do. ;)

Oh, and don't forget that you're not allowed to break anybody's connectivity at 
any
point along the line.  The NCP->IP migration was bad enough wnen there were only
several hundred hosts.  We'll never get to do that again.  If you have half the 
users
migrated to SMTP-bis and half are still on SMTP-classic, they *will* have to
be able to communicate, or you *will* be fired.

So for instance, the previous paragraph is why *any* proposal that doesn't 
provide
benefit until 98% or so of the net has deployed it is doomed to fail unless you 
give
a *really* good explanation of why 98% of the people should deploy it when it 
isn't
going to give them any benefit if 3% of the OTHER people don't bother....


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