> From: Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com> > > Please indicate some historical basis for moving an installed base of > > users on this kind of scale and for this kind of reason. > > History is replete with examples. From the Internet Worm What? The Morris Worm resulted in a significant marketshare decline for sendmail? That's strange, since my recollections are that sendmail became more instead of less popular, in part because SMTP swamped other protocols. > to Code Red, > consumers do install software when they perceive either a threat or a > benefit. Do you really intend to say what those words mean in context, that Microsoft products were replaced wholesale by other software. > Getting rid of spam is a HUGE benefit. Heck. What I've found > so amusing is that people seem to upgrade their Microsoft systems just > 'cause, with no perceived benefit, but merely protecting from Bit Rot. Installing patches or updates that do not significantly change the form, fit or function of a system is entirely different from pitching SMTP and switching to something else with major differences not only in form, fit, and function but fundamental assumptions. Spam is an implicit problem in any mail protocol that lets you receive mail from strangers. If a message is from a stranger, how do you know the stranger isn't sending copies to 30,000,000 of your intimate friends? Any protocol that keeps a stranger and so possible spamemr from sending you a message will be a radical change far larger than the change from IPv4 to IPv6, not to mention turning off the debug switch in sendmail or pasting yet another a security bandaid on IIS. For example, Cisco will stop receiving spam as well as inquiries from prospective customers, at least not as freely and with semi-anomity as today. This mailing list will stop receiving new subscriptions by the old mechanism of sending a "subscribe" mail message. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com