For context, absolutely none of the major email delivery providers (AWS SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, SMTP_com, etc.) support ipv6.
On the receiving end, only Gmail properly supports ipv6.
Your analogy doesn't work as we were not sending mail from ipv6 in the first place. So we're not downgrading to an "inferior" protocol in any way.
A more accurate picture would be that we were using TLS 1.2 for 99.999% of the time before and would now use it 100% of the time.
The email world is unfortunately still overwhelmingly ipv4 and unlike other protocols, adding ipv6 support is not trivial.
If you know of a cloud email delivery service that supports ipv6, is cost-effective, reputable and reliable, please share it with us.
The goal of the migration is to stop relying on a single, expensive, unstable, self-hosted machine and instead let a cloud provider handle the infrastructure in a reliable and scalable way.
Nick
On Fri, Jun 28, 2024 at 7:03 PM S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Michael,
At 01:07 AM 28-06-2024, Michael Richardson wrote:
>Hi, so I guess that I didn't realize that the move to Amazon would mean that
>we'd lose our ability to send out email ourselves.
>I would have liked that to have been made clearer.
>
>Despite what John said, I actually think we had other choices which support
>IPv6.
>I realize that there are parts of the IETF who don't think IPv6 is important.
>I think they are really really wrong, and in 2024, it ought to be possible to
>do email with IPv6-mostly.
I moved my response to ietf@ as I it may be more about policy.
The IETF has offered a good mail service over the years. The
response time and technical support on the rare occasions where I
encountered an issue was well above average.
John has a point on the comment about "nobody noticed" when the IETF
mail server was no longer sending mail over IPv6. I don't know
anything about the cost implications. I took a look at the latest
contracts and some plenary slides to find out more about the changes
to IETF mail infrastructure as I may have missed the reading the
information about the IPv6 change. It seemed a bit odd that the IETF
LLC was outsourcing its mail service to a cloud provider (please see
my comment about the mail service over the years).
Let's say the change was for another protocol, e.g. TLS. Would the
people agree to a move from v.1.3 to v.1.2 because that is what the
outsourcing provider offers?
Getting back to the second part of your comment, I would look at it
in terms of managing growth. It would be interesting to see whether
the IETF LLC's decision will influence other LLCs to follow a similar
path, and the overall effect.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
