At 10:56 AM -0400 8/16/07, Keith Moore wrote:
michael(_dot_)dillon(_at_)bt(_dot_)com wrote:
Finally, a sensible solution!
After all, why should any mail server operator accept incoming email
from another server without a prior mail peering agreement in place?
in other words, why would you ever want to communicate with someone with
whom you had no prior arrangement?
just stick your head in a hole in the ground and be done with it.
As both of you know and understand, the email system was built to be an
any-to-any mesh. That's not just a design goal. Folks have operated a lot of
gateways, written a lot of 8-to-7 code, and jumped through a lot of hoops to
make
sure that the network effect of email was a great as possible: that there were
as
few people left out of the email system as possible.
Spammers work with that design. They send from anywhere (zombie hosts, poorly
policed webmail providers, domains and accounts that exist for only the
briefest practical times) to anyone (dictionary attack-derived names, scraped
addresses, etc).
Many of the efforts to thwart spam work against the design of email,
and, as a result they tend to be both deeply painful and to have long term
effects long after their effectiveness at fighting spam is gone.
There are messaging systems that do not have email's core design.
Many IM systems, for example, don't assume you can send
a message to anyone; you have to be permitted first. The problem is that
you need a way to communicate about the permission that doesn't use
that messaging: you have to see the person, call them up, or send them email
to say "hey, I'm hardie(_at_)im(_dot_)example(_dot_)com, add me to your list".
You need an
any-to-any mesh *other* than the permission-based system, in other words,
for the permission-based system to avoid having a very limited network effect.
(Of course, if you wanted a limited network, that's not an issue). You can move
the problem around, in other words, but as long as you retain that design goal,
you have the same problem.
I, for one, am not ready to abandon the design goal. I think email was the
first
"killer app" for the Internet, and it remains one of the most powerful initial
applications as Internet applications are made available in new arenas. RIM's
success, for example, seems to me clearly due to bringing any-to-any email
to wireless users in ways others did not. That does not mean that individuals
or organizations should not be able to reject email wholesale if they want; I
have recommended whitelist based systems for my nephews and nieces, to give
one trivial example. But we should not change the core design; we need it.
It's really one of the most fundamental demonstrations of what the Internet
can do.
best regards,
Ted Hardie
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