On 10/26/2015 1:01 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
My experience of "badly broken": pre-filter, for my email address
(mellon(_at_)fugue(_dot_)com <mailto:mellon(_at_)fugue(_dot_)com>) alone,
spam is currently
arriving at a rate of about three messages per minute. Why? Because
the design assumptions for email did not account for the fact that in
the wild, email is an ecosystem, not a cooperative venture, and there is
money to be made with scattershot spam, and money to be made filtering it.
For 25-30 years, the email system we use now wasn't "in the wild". The
service was developed, operated and used in a more constrained
environment. Failure to anticipate massive and fundamental changes in a
computing and communication environment, decades hence, is not exactly a
design failure. A problem, of course. But that's different from a failure.
On the other hand, assessing it as a failure fits into an increasingly
common template of changing the email operating environment's rules and
then suddenly reclassifying usage which worked fine in the past as now
being a 'violation'.
The amount of brainpower that’s required to keep this rickety train on
the rails is astonishing. It is no longer the case that someone like
you or I with the resources of an individual can have a reasonably
painless experience of operating an SMTP server. To my mind, this
means that SMTP does not "work."
If I'm reading your text correctly, you are saying that the fact that a
service that was once simple to operate but that now requires extensive
staffing and expertise subjects the service to an assessment of 'does
not work'?
Yet I'm pretty sure that that kind of transition from simplicity to
complexity that requires staffing and expertise is the hallmark of many
(all?) infrastructure services in all technologically developed cultures.
Few consumers operate their own telephone exchange or their own air
traffic control center or their own water purification center or...
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net