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Re: draft-kucherawy-greylisting-bcp

2011-10-26 10:58:16


On Oct 26, 2011, at 8:33 AM, Pete Resnick wrote:


On 10/26/11 10:18 AM, Dave CROCKER wrote:

On 10/26/2011 5:08 PM, Pete Resnick wrote:

If it can be deployed and you
get get incremental implementation experience, it should be on the Standards
Track; it shouldn't be a second class citizen of being a BCP.

Greylisting is not a protocol, according to any definition I know.

There is no way to test "interoperability".

Rubbish. I can assure you that if someone implemented greylisting in such a 
way that "legitimate" mail stopped being delivered, because they set the 
greylist timeout too long or because they used a status code that everyone 
choked on or some other such thing that was underspecified in the RFC, people 
would say that the implemenation was not interoperating in the mailing 
transport/delivery system and that implementation experience dictated changes 
to the specification in order to improve future implementations (assuming 
that the spec failed to specify the correct parameters). Greylisting is far 
more obviously a protocol with testable interoperability than is, say, RFC 
5234 or 5322.

ESMTP is the protocol. Greylisting itself has no protocol (it's just a local 
policy for a mailserver using the ESMTP protocol) so there's no way to test 
interoperability.

You can test ESMTP interoperability, you can certainly test interoperabilty 
between ESMTP peers that are implementing greylisting. But you can't test 
*greylisting* interoperability, as there's no protocol there.

Cheers,
  Steve