What I meant was that IPv6 should be mandatory for email because now or in the future there might be some participant who can only participate in email discussions via IPv6.This is the opposite of reality now. Enabling IPv6 currently makes it HARDER to get reliable email delivery. For example, I need to use postfix features to disable email delivery over ipv6 to google to avoid getting “spam blocked” without recourse to get google to fix their false positives. And google is one of the very few if not only large email provider supporting v6 to begin with.
You're not contradicting what I said. Let me try to say it
differently: If a recipient's only MXes only have IPv6 addresses,
IETF should attempt to deliver mail to them. If a recipient's
MXes are reachable by both IPv4 and IPv6, I'm fine with IETF using
IPv4 to deliver to that recipient.
(And more generally if there's a need for an RFC to say "MTAs
should have a switch to prefer IPv4 over IPv6 for outgoing mail",
let's write that. But maybe the RFC should also supply some
guidance for migrating email to using IPv6, in light of
operational experience, as this will certainly be needed sooner or
later. Let's try to move in the right direction rather than
backward.)
Right, but by refusing to support email over IPv6, IETF is actually perpetuating the undesirable situation, setting a poor example, and making it less likely that the situation will change to be more favorable.There are good reasons for purposefully disabling v6 for email, so I don’t believe the current setup is harmful. I hope the situation changes over the next few years both for v6 email in general and our options to enable v6 email.
It would also be helpful if you do not classify disagreements as “incompetence”, and that you simple state your disagreements without prefixes like categorically, absolutely, emphatically, totally, etc which not only lose their meaning if used in every message but which also seems to attempt to increase your voice of 1 opinion into something more than it is.
I won't try to argue with a broad generalization. If you want to respond to some specific statement I've made, feel free - though it's probably more effective to do so privately.
Keith
