On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 10:26:04PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
[...]
Personally, I've got a strong sense of morals and
appropriateness where these issues are concerned, and I find the
idea of silently discarding a message, or even a non-delivery
report, when there is any chance it is legitimate to be really
scary. If it becomes general practice, we will quickly lose the
general perception that email is reliable.
I'm not sure this is worth worrying about, because the battle is
probably already lost. At one level, viruses and worms are very quickly
making it clear to the general public that address information in email
cannot be relied upon. At another level, the low signal-to-noise ratio
and increasing volumes in email traffic means that the ability of human
beings at the endpoints to reliably process their email becomes an
important factor.
That is, as an end-to-end protocol, where the endpoints are human
beings, email is already unreliable, and is becoming less reliable
every day.
And that is the
point at which many of us go back to the post, or fax, or even
letters in bottles.
Or forward.
--
Kent Crispin
kent(_at_)icann(_dot_)org p: +1 310 823 9358 f: +1 310 823 8649
kent(_at_)songbird(_dot_)com SIP: 81202(_at_)fwd(_dot_)pulver(_dot_)com