On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 00:42 -0800, James Couzens wrote:
You should absolutely NOT be trying to implement
a cryptographic solution to the worlds most widely and diversely
deployed Internet technology which puts the BURDEN _FULLY_ on the
shoulders of the recipient.
Odd to have everyone looking so intently at it and yet no one other than
John Levine (that I have read) has voiced this concern out loud. Wonder
how that makes everyone look?
CPU power is cheap enough that I think most people really don't see it
as a problem; I certainly don't.
Most highly laden mail servers are presumably more I/O and network-bound
than CPU-bound. Has there been a serious study of how the demand for
crypto would affect that?
Perhaps I might not be able to run my primary mail server on a dual
Pentium-200 machine any more; but then again I already run it IPv6-only
to keep its SpamAssassin load down, because SA _does_ chew CPU. It
accepts most of its mail from the MX backups which do have addresses on
the Legacy Internet, using crypto (SMTP+TLS).
It would certainly be interesting to see a study of how CPU load on mail
servers would be affected by DK; especially one which recognises the
fact that you don't actually have to run other CPU-intensive checks like
SpamAssassin and virus checking on mails which were already rejected due
to the crypto check.
The cost of the crypto is perceived to be negligible. If you feel
strongly that it's not negligible, you'd need to show numbers to
convince me (and others) of that. Especially so if you're claiming it's
not just non-negligible, but prohibitive.
--
dwmw2