Hi John,
I moved my reply to ietf@xxxxxxxx.
At 06:26 AM 30-10-2024, Ted Lemon wrote:
John, with all due respect (which is a lot!), there is exactly one
printer on the internet that sends mail via SMTP, and Other John
owns it. There is zero risk that it's going to stop working for him,
because he can just use an old version of sendmail as a relay: one
that supports STARTTLS but doesn't require it. It is not unusual to
have to set up stuff like this to deal with old tech, although the
carbon footprint of this hypothetical printer may justify recycling
it at this point.
Nobody is going to mock the IETF for making this change. If we are
going to be mocked, it will be for not making this change.
And if some government makes STARTTLS illegal, then it's on them to
figure out how this is going to work. Will they also make HTTPS
illegal? If they did that, it would be up to them to figure out how
to make it work, not up to us. It is not our job to help random
despotic governments snoop on their citizens. If they want to do
that, that's their choice, but we are 100% not obliged to help them.
There may be good arguments against requiring STARTTLS, but neither
of the arguments you have advanced here is among them.
I am currently going through the experience of Internet filtering. I
gather that mail submission is still working. STARTTLS is probably
also working. It's unlikely that I would not send this message if
STARTTLS was unavailable as the message is going to a mailing list
which is publicly accessible.
As a comment about HTTPS, one of the sites which used to be available
over HTTPS is www.youtube.com. I cannot access that web site at the moment.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
