Salz, Rich wrote on 30/06/2024 13:41:
Remember, these are the folks that declared running an anonymous
FTP server "too hard."
What was said was different, and the distinction is important. Given
limited resources, it is not worth doing; other things are more
important.
this is the crux of the problem with SMTP too.
Running a larger scale SMTP service has become progressively more
difficult over the years, to the point that it's now a
resource-intensive headache which requires specialist knowledge. If the
SMTP deployment is large enough, it can be worth hiring that specialist
knowledge and running the service in-house, and it if's small enough,
you can squeak by without. The time when this sort of thing could be
done easily / at low cost is in the far distance in the rear view mirror.
It looks to me like the IETF's mail requirements fall somewhere inside
the large and increasing gap between "trivially small" and "large enough
to justify inhouse expertise". There are two options here: either sink
the cost, or outsource the service.
For sure, the optics of having SMTP service unavailable over IPv6 are
awkward for the IETF. Consensus is unlikely to be achieved on the topic:
some people will consistently maintain that eating IETF dog food is more
important. Others will argue that the resourcing cost makes it non-viable.
I would view it that it shows the maturity level of the operating
organisation that they're given the leeway to make their own decisions
about how to allocate the finite resources that they're provided with.
If the IETF community has a difficulty with this, it would be more
productive to address the root cause (i.e. that provisioning smtp is
rather expensive, and all the more so when using ipv6), rather than
complain about the symptoms (i.e. that IETF LLC has made a decision in a
difficult operating environment which caused some people to be surprise).
Nick
