On Mon, 13 Mar 2017, Carsten Bormann wrote:
The most likely outcome is that local admins will “upgrade" our mail
system by turning off IPv6. (We have had IPv6 deployed for some 18
years now.)
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017, Philip Homburg wrote:
Getting mail delivered to gmail over IPv6 works most of the time without
ever setting up SPF or DKIM. Gmail does seem to be the single most
unreliable mail server that I know of, mostly due to their attempts
to be more strict on IPv6.
As I hope everyone knows, receiving mail requires orders of magnitude more
work than sending it. Even 20 years ago before spam was an issue,
recipients had to receive it, route it, store it somewhere, filter it with
sieve or procmail, and provide POP or IMAP for the recipient to collect
it. These days, with 90% of mail being spam or worse, there's another
magnitude of work in trying to separate the real mail from the flood of
junk. Or try this thought experiment: how hard would it be to send a
million messages a day from your laptop (easy), and how hard would be be
to receive and deliver a million messages a day on that laptop
(impossible.)
The point of authentication schemes like SPF and DKIM is to make it easier
for recipients to tell that your mail is from you, so they can treat it
differently from the spam. Everywhere else, the response is OK, I would
prefer that people get the mail I send them, I will set up authentication
because it is not hard (SPF takes about 5 minutes), and it helps the
people who are handling my mail with the mail system they are paying for.
I can also assure you from many conversations with large mail providers
that you will increasingly find that recipients will conclude that if you
can't be bothered to authenticate your mail, they can't be bothered to
deliver it. It's their mail system, they get to do that.
In the IETF, for some reason, people take a perverse pride in offering no
help whatsoever to mail recipients, even when that help costs them
nothing, and then snark and whine when the recipients have trouble dealing
with the unauthenticated mail. I don't understand why, but I really wish
people would stop. Nobody is impressed that your mail system does exactly
what it did 20 years ago, and it gives outsiders the impression that the
IETF is a bunch of out of touch sociopaths.
R's,
Johh