From: Eliot Lear <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Please indicate some historical basis for moving an installed base of
users on this kind of scale and for this kind of reason.
History is replete with examples. From the Internet Worm
What? The Morris Worm resulted in a significant marketshare decline
for sendmail? That's strange, since my recollections are that sendmail
became more instead of less popular, in part because SMTP swamped
other protocols.
to Code Red,
consumers do install software when they perceive either a threat or a
benefit.
Do you really intend to say what those words mean in context, that
Microsoft products were replaced wholesale by other software.
Getting rid of spam is a HUGE benefit. Heck. What I've found
so amusing is that people seem to upgrade their Microsoft systems just
'cause, with no perceived benefit, but merely protecting from Bit Rot.
Installing patches or updates that do not significantly change the
form, fit or function of a system is entirely different from pitching
SMTP and switching to something else with major differences not only
in form, fit, and function but fundamental assumptions.
Spam is an implicit problem in any mail protocol that lets you receive
mail from strangers. If a message is from a stranger, how do you know
the stranger isn't sending copies to 30,000,000 of your intimate
friends? Any protocol that keeps a stranger and so possible spamemr
from sending you a message will be a radical change far larger than
the change from IPv4 to IPv6, not to mention turning off the debug
switch in sendmail or pasting yet another a security bandaid on IIS.
For example, Cisco will stop receiving spam as well as inquiries from
prospective customers, at least not as freely and with semi-anomity
as today. This mailing list will stop receiving new subscriptions by
the old mechanism of sending a "subscribe" mail message.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com