On Thu, 24 Aug 2023, Keith Moore wrote:
* We have, IMO, largely failed to make email interoperable in the presence of spam filters. Making email delivery reliable is currently, as far as I can tell, a dark art.
If you know how to do that, I know a lot of people who really really would like to talk to you. The same message might be legit to someone who asked for it and spam to someone who didn't, so there's no technical way to distinguish. Most of the spam that gets into my inbox is from throwaway accounts at the same places that send much of my real mail, and not for lack of effort on the part of mail systems to stop it. (At this point, whatever clever anti-spam scheme someone might suggest, I'm confident I can tell you whre it's failed before.)
* The widespread use of email from mobile handheld devices has had a tremendous effect on the usability of email for technical collaboration, such as IETF does.
This is conflating cause and effect. People are going to use their phones for mail whether we like it or not, so it would be a good idea for us to figure out how to make it work. Telling them to go away until they can find a real computer isn't it.
* We've completely failed to make email end-to-end secure, not because the problems aren't solvable, but because we've let a very small number of people talk us out of trying.
At this point I don't even know what "end" means. Where's the end in a webmail session?
Etc. R's, John PS:
* We've failed to adapt SMTP/IMAP/POP authentication standards (and for authentication in other application protocols) to a world where multi-factor authentication is increasingly required, and where hardware authentication tokens are widely available.
For once I agree with you, although there seems to be some progress there. Perhaps we need to talk more to the FIDO people.
