Re: productivity?

John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Thursday, August 25, 2011 09:49 -0400 Hector Santos
> <hsantos(_at_)santronics(_dot_)com> wrote:
>
> > Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
> > +1.  Or we can begin with a basic tenet of "do no harm."   It
> > is obvious the issues of a well vetting system perform for a
> > past era where hubs were more dominant and using ideas of
> > connection sharing were isolated to well known connections,
> > conflicts in a modern world where there is less hubbing, more
> > peer to peer and anonymous connectivity.  Just consider how
> > Facebook has become a new high mail sender where it needs to
> > improve its client side loads but its distribution is towards
> > a larger pool of smaller smtp servers.  If it was assumed that
> > every facebook user had a common host account, i.e. gmail.com,
> > then we back to the centralization and hub-hub concepts where
> > this stuff was ideal.
> FWIW, while I have some fundamental concerns about this as a
> strategy (and have a different picture of history than the one
> Hector describes above), 
You see, I see that as unnecessary statement and one that continues 
with the dismissing expertise and the concerns. I'm sure we all do and 
have different perspective.  I can only base mine of actual mailer and 
mail/file distribution, hubbing product development experience with:
   Early local community access of BBS Systems
   The networking of BBS systems
   Gateways of different mail networks
   Fidonet
   UUCP
   FTP HUBBING
   SMTP

where by far, the mail/file distribution topology was much different 
than it is today simply because everyone and their grandma has 24x7 
internet access unlike in the past.
In these mailers, there was one common idea:

 - 1 to 1

   Netmail (Fidonet) and Email (internet) - instant, dynamic 
sending/delivery
 - 1 to many

   Groupware, EchoMail (fido), News (internet) - delayed, queued, 
scheduling
Internet List mail is an email kludge form of groupware and some 
people have it naturally fall under a 1 to 1 model already prepared 
netmail/email instant delivery and others have it prepared for 1 to 
many delayed distribution - a simple delay or dependent on frequency 
of list mail. Scheduling was also tied to who the targets were.
Fidonet mailers had built-in multi-message packet exchanges, so that 
was never an issue.  We designed and sold PPP servers, UUCP and SMTP 
products to many of the early ISPs that began to offer internet 
related services to their Online users and hosted domains.  Many 
operators who were privy to direct connections to the internet offered 
internet and SMTP access and for hosting drop off points with UUCP and 
also FTP.  Many operators with FTP drop/receive mail/files exchange 
points, started the growth of many popular products like InternetRex 
that handled all this for operators where it was yet feasible to 
install a 24x7 access point with ISDN or T1. DSL was still in the 
horizon.
Many hubs also used Planet Connect, the first to offer a satellite 
feed for downloading Mail Bones and File Bones feeds with a small home 
dish.  These hubs offer services to other people - free or for a fee. 
 There were some early IETF people, early member of Fidonet, who used 
their academia internet access to piggyback fidonet over the mail 
bones internationally.
All of this was the norm with industry vendors in the early trade 
shows like OneBBS CON which was sold and renamed to OneISP CON 
(ISPCON) and it also passed away in 2009.  This is an interest foot 
note and thread that amply applies here to discussion:
     http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ISPCON-No-More-101070

     ... The death of ISPCON and ISP Planet serves as kind of a 
footnote to
     the slow but steady death of smaller, independent ISPs in the 
United States.
     "In the long term, carriers will survive, ISPs will not," the 
CEO of one
     ISP carrier tells me.

Never mind the fact that this prediction assumes every corporation in 
the world will switch to GMAIL.COM, the fact that we are still in 
business negates that prediction as a whole, in fact, I see the 
opposite.
What is true is that many smaller ISPs simply lower their desire to 
compete with the larger ISPs - their services were cut and they began 
to focus on the vertical markets needs rather the horizontal. Its the 
economy of scale - you don't need 100% of the market, sometimes 1% or 
even less is good enough.  So while we don't concentrate on a general 
hosting server for people to setup, many do it for private 
communications and special needs.
The point is, data distribution was spread out with different ways and 
most of the time, unless a service operator didn't care, and certainly 
not one where a client presumes a server didn't care, only with 
special access was one able to do these larger mail exchange concepts 
- regardless of the transport mechanism.   The fact that SMTP has 
prevail, does not change the issue.
So sure, people will see "history different" - bull or noise, mine 
came on decades of direct experiences working cooperatively with my 
peers and offering products that served a wide spread of ISPes and 
data distribution needs.  Today, anyone can have a "cheap" 24x7 
connection and preparing a SMTP server host site is very cheap to do.
> Let's get a draft in front of us that spells out the details,
> analyzes the side effects, and that includes a Security
> Considerations section that enumerates and evaluates the
> possible attacks and how to deal with this.  Then we have have a
> real discussion.  Without it, all we have is more noise on the
> list, people making suggestions that other people agree with (or
> not) depending on their perceptions of what is being proposed
> (perceptions that may not exactly match the intentions of the
> original proposal), and so on.
I agree and I would normally be eager to consider writing it myself, 
but unfortunately thats a non-starter so it would be better of someone 
else step up to the plate and begin write it. I would not mind 
starting it if someone else takes it over.
--
Sincerely

Hector Santos
http://www.santronics.com