ietf-smtp
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Re: SMTP Transferred-By-Reference

2007-11-12 09:22:10



John Leslie wrote:
Doug Otis and I have been working up a proposal for a SMTP extension to shift some of the burden of spam abatement away from the receiving SMTP servers towards the originator. It is now published at:

http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/draft-otis-smtp-tbr-ext

In essence it holds the originator responsible for maintaining the copy of the message until a receiving Mail User Agent determines that it should be delivered to the recipient.

1. <http://tinyurl.com/2lpvkm>

actual:
<http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=62&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&s1=tumbleweed&p=2&OS=tumbleweed&RS=tumbleweed>

They enforce this patents and its follow-ons very aggressively.


2. At best, this reduces total bytes over the but the requirement for a notification message does not reduce the number of network 'transactions' -- in fact it increases them by 100% or more.

3. This presumes that making a real-time decision is a current problem, when it is not generally held to be a major factor among the anti-abuse community. Sure, it would be nice to be able to do it, but it's a long way from the top of the list.

4. It presumes that users can make the right decision. Experience is pretty clear that that's too often not a correct presumption. In addition, having users be required to make this decision burdens them far more than is felt to be useful. (This is a derivation of the transaction cost item, above, except that it moves the decision-making from a receive-side front-end filter to the human user. And of course, it them requires them to wait for the message to show up.

5. Doesn't work so well for disconnected users.

d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net