On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 10:50 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
--On Thursday, June 12, 2014 16:19 +0200 Dave Crocker
<dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
(2) One of those changes --support for remote body parts-- was
incorporated into MIME in its very first version and contains
most of the mechanism needed to support what I understand PHB is
recommending for PUSH-PULL-PULL. It has been implemented in
several places but has gotten very little traction in the mail
sending and receiving community. IMO, it ought to be incumbent
on anyone proposing a different "get notification, then retrieve
mail from server" model explain why their ideas will be more
successful than that 20-odd-year-old MIME mechanism.
In a word - WebMail.
Updating mail clients is a long and tedious process so it is not surprising
that updates take a lot of time to percolate through. It was 5 years after
the initial deployment of MIME before mail clients to support it became
common. And the first of those that did were actually combined mail/NNTP
readers.
WebMail is a much more fluid environment. A change in the specs can be
pushed out to half the mail userbase very quickly. With DKIM we saw changes
pushed out to around a tenth of the mail user base in a few hours.
All it would take to make a change stick is to up update mailman and a few
other mailing list managers and get buy in from the companies that are
pushing DMARC. And the proposal would save them a lot of money because they
would only need to pull and store data once per list rather than for every
subscriber they support.
I don't read all my mail in Webmail, but I read all my mailing list mail in
WebMail.
(3) Even though adjustments have been made to deal with changing
knowledge and needs, we have been using the old, Newtonian, view
of mechanics for circa 300 years, not merely 30 or 40. Perhaps
the argument for dumping old things because not every issue and
bit of future knowledge was originally designed into those
laws/theories should be used to dump them too. Perhaps they
should even have been dumped in the middle of the 19th century
before relativity and quantum theory came along.
Actually Newton made the exact same arguments as Einstein concerning
relativity. The only difference was that Newton concluded that the speed of
light must be infinite which was consistent with the empirical observations
possible in his day.
The starting point for this discussion was that people claimed that DMARC
would cause a loss of email functionality that really matters. There are
thus three possible outcomes:
1) Google and Yahoo abandon use of an important anti-spam tool because the
ability for anyone to send mail from a domain from anywhere they choose
really matters.
2) Google and Yahoo continue use of an important anti-spam tool they have
developed and deployed because said ability does not matter enough.
3) The IETF community develops a new protocol that meets the needs that
will be negatively impacted by DMARC.
Now I think it abundantly clear that arguments in favor of 1 have lost
already and should lose. So we are really arguing between choice 2 or 3.