From: Paul Vixie <vixie(_at_)vix(_dot_)com>
What do you expect me to do? I won't answer your draft notice
"hell no I won't go!" but I'm not going to enlist until I have a
glimmer of where you're sailing and what's under the decks.
at this point I'm still looking for the answer to some simple questions.
1. does the ietf as a community generally believe that provable
mutual consent between a sender and recipient is an achievable
(technically) and desireable (by the global user base) goal?
What's that about a "community"? Individuals can believe things, but
communities can only argue. Communities also don't write code or even
Internet-drafts. It's also not clear to me what "provable mutual
consent" means. I suspect it's something other than PGP key servers
or PKI, but I've no clue if it's more interesting than the NSA's
Rainbow Series on Trusted Computer Systems on one hand or the unending
stream of unbreakable military grade one time pad psuedo-random number
based encryption products on the other.
2. if #1, does this same community believe #1 can be accomplished
by means of negative pressure (bayesian, dcc, blackhole lists,
hashcash, etc) on the current e-mail system (smtp, rfc822, mime)?
I see no consensus on what to do about spam and don't believe one is
possible for any of those efforts or any group of them. It's
possible that something new would fair better, but pigs in pokes are
hard to sell except to those whose opinions are worthless.
3. if !#2, then does this same community have any interest in being
a creative, ambitious force that brings this functionality to
the masses, or should this work be pursued independently/elsewhere?
After passing that through an exhortation filter, I'm left with "should
work be pursued independently/elsewhere?" which is hard to gainsay.
The continuing history of IPng is cautionary for IETF Manhattan-project
style community efforts.
there are other issues, like whether there has to be a flag day for e-mail
and whether gateways into/outof "old style e-mail" can exist, but frankly
those are details which won't matter (to this mailing list) if the answers
to the above continue to be "not really", "well probably" and "elsewhere"
as they have been since may 25 when i entered this thread.
The little I've understood is that you've said something about "mutual
consent" and vendors or notaries of the same, which for me evokes
"like Verisign?" and a little more best unsaid.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com