So on the one hand we have John Klensin asking 'why not do it in SMTP' and on the other we have John Levine showing why not.
And again, I am not proposing the objective here is to replace SMTP, just that I expect SMTP to be collateral damage because anything that can fix the holes in SMTP will provide a means to escape from it.
On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 1:34 PM John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> authenticated *and subject to access control with a default deny posture *
>>
>> The access control is the key. J random grifter cannot send Alice spam
>> BECAUSE SHE HAS NOT AUTHORIZED HIM TO SEND MESSAGES TO HER.
I have to say I'm surprised to see this ancient chestnut reappearing.
For about 30 years people have been reinventing this idea, trying to turn
the spam problem into the introduction problem, and only accepting mail
from people who've been introduced. Which might work except that the
introduction problem is harder than the spam problem and as people have
pointed out, it is not a bug that you can send email to people you haven't
written to before.
Take a look at what is happening on the Internet. SMTP is dying. Young people are turning away from it. Many people use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. etc. and they are using it:
INSTEAD OF SMTP.
These 'walled gardens' you are referring to in mocking tones are whipping SMTP's sorry hide. If SMTP was a MLB player, it would have been relegated to the minor leagues many seasons ago.
The only thing I am proposing that is new here is that the users can choose their own service provider and talk to people using a different service provider.
If each person maintains her own list of correspndents and authorization
tokens, that's Zoemail, described in US patent 5,930,479 which was filed
in 1996. If an external authority decides who gets to be introduced,
that's Facebook.
And every major feature of Facebook was anticipated in the Open Meeting of 1994.
As Blockchain proved, a patent (Surety, 1990) is a pretty good way of killing ideas for 20 years, often longer.
For a particularly bad version of this idea, take a look at the original
version of Boxbe, in which you could charge people to send you mail. It
died from unrelated patent problems but it was a big hit among the pudit
class who imagined that they were so important that people would pay them
to read messages, and that those messages would nonetheless be worth
reading.
Which is not what I proposed so why raise it?
