Ted, while I would be interested in such a discussion, I will
not be in Yokohama. I might be able to participate in a
discussion remotely, but that could equally be held at some
other time and, as you point out, some of us do better f2f.
Thanks. I'm sorry you won't be there--you are one of the people I was hoping
could participate. Unfortunately, it looks like the next N IETFs are all
difficult travel IETFs for U.S. folks, which is fair enough considering how
many U.S. IETFs we have had recently.
Indeed. Even if one moves beyond privacy issues to concerns
about law enforcement access with all of the trappings, there is
a huge practical difference between "dear third party, give us
everything in Ted's mailbox and don't tell Ted we asked/demanded
it" and "dear Ted, give us everything in your mailbox and don't
tell Ted... whoops".
Yup. It also avoids the rich motherlode problem: if you have a hundred
million mailboxes on your service, and someone breaks in, a hundred million
peoples' privacy could be compromised (of course, this is an
oversimplification, since I think google has some pretty solid security fu, for
example, but we've seen other large providers, particularly the US government,
hit by this recently).
If the answer is "no" and the earlier comment that email
standards are set today, not by an open process but by a handful
of large providers working in concert (including those two),
then one meeting that ought to be held, with appropriate lawyers
present, would discuss a class action antitrust suit against the
companies involved. It could be more effective, interesting,
and profitable than whining on the IETF list and, given that
standards-setting hypothesis, would presumably be prerequisite
to any real progress.
FWIW, I do not think that there is any bad action going on here. Google
accepts email from my server just fine, actually quite a bit better than a lot
of Postfixes, because small sites so frequently use greylisting. I haven't
noticed Yahoo doing anything particularly good or bad. The problem is not bad
action, but simply that nobody is motivated to make things work in a
distributed matter other than a few people like us. And the big providers, by
dint of their size, have really big problems, and really big staffs that are
working on them, so it's not surprising that they move more quickly than we do
and think me at least as a bit of a dilettante (it would be pretty funny if
they thought of you that way).