Hi Nick,
At 04:52 PM 28-06-2024, Nicolas Giard wrote:
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.
Thanks for providing some context.
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.
I agree with your point that IPv4 is not an inferior protocol. In
regards to my analogy being flawed, you have a point. After sending
the message, I remembered that the IPv6 transition approach was
shelved a decade. People started writing about IPv4/IPv6
co-existence. It's a bit like having the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
side by side with the Panama Canal serving as a gateway between those
two oceans.
The picture (please see comment about TLS v1.2) depends on how the
customer base maps to the decimal point. The decimal point can have
a significant impact on the revenue of a MNC. There can also be
other considerations. For example, the SMTP server at your end used
TLS v1.3 (the cipher was TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384) to interoperate with
the SMTP server at my end. I would not have received your email if
the server at this end only supported TLS up to v1.2. Now, if I was
running an organization for charitable purposes, I may have to
consider whether it is okay to make communication difficult for you.
The email world is unfortunately still overwhelmingly ipv4 and
unlike other protocols, adding ipv6 support is not trivial.
It is quite understandable that it can be quite overwhelming for some
companies. A company may not have the engineering capabilities to
add IPv6 support for SMTP and IMAPv4. It is not that difficult
though; most software have IPv6 enabled in the default
configuration. I actually turned mail and other services into
IPv6-ready services well over a decade ago. One of the customers had
a requirement that every service should be IPv6-enabled.
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.
From the above description I gather that the policy of the IETF LLC
is to outsource everything. I would need more information on the
requirements as they are a bit subjective. Is there any information
available about the SMTP traffic? Does the LLC require compliance
with commercially-viable standards? Is there any publicly available
information on the opex for the machine and ancillary expenses?
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
