John C Klensin wrote:
[..]
<snip>
But the notion that the IETF can prevent something from happening or
being deployed by declining to register it, or by turning our
collective backs on it without any real explanation -- even at the
waist of the hourglass-- is, in this world, just delusional. And, if
that delusion prevents the IETF community from explaining, carefully
and in public why the idea is a bad one, then it is we who are putting
the Internet at risk.
john
(This message is duplicated on my blog, so, moderators, don't even
bother trying to block it).
So...why hasn't the IETF labeled SMTP and POP3, not just a bad idea, but
a terrible one and scrapped (obsoleted, terminated, or whatever you want
to call it) both protocols and come up with something completely new
without a migration path (i.e. the terminated SMTP and POP3 protocols
can't talk to the new protocol and vice versa)?
While that is some lovely writing, I have yet to see the IETF do
anything constructive in lieu of the spam that plagues the Internet. In
my book, the IETF is to blame for spam, both its existence and its
continuation. Also, from what I can tell over the past few years of
watching this list, no one in the IETF has the guts nor the spinal
column needed to do anything about it. Instead of all of you getting
drunk at BOF meetings, how about actually fixing the spam problem and
perhaps a few other protocols while you are at it. You are the Internet
_Engineering_ Task Force. It is your job to make new protocols and fix
broken protocols, and it is the implementor's responsibility to follow
changes without complaint. If you terminate SMTP and POP3 or simply
re-write the core Internet protocols from the ground-up, every
implementation out there MUST follow. If the IETF thinks it can do
nothing about spam, then it is already delusional and the world needs a
new organization that isn't blind to the world's needs. We wouldn't
have the problems today that we currrently have if the IETF was actually
doing its job.
All I have to ask is: Who around here loves receiving spam? Who is
ultimately responsible for the spam people get?
Bite the bullet, get some guts, and grow a spine. Sure it is scary to
replace major protocols in such a radical fashion, but we all know it is
long overdue, so just do it. Implementors around the world will love
you if you do (spam drives them up the wall because they have to
constantly counter-act it with new "needless" features in their servers).
Note that this is partly my personal angst, partly an implementor's
view, partly because spam is a real problem that isn't being dealt with,
and partly because SMTP and POP3 are so incredibly old and riddled with
hacks for MIME, attachments, multi-byte character sets/unicode, and use
cleartext transmissions (except over more recent SSL/TLS hacks). At
some point the hacks have to hit a limit and spam was the indicator of
that limit, only the IETF ignored it and kept going.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the near future, companies and
individuals started suing the IETF for damages for every spam message
they receive. I'll bet a class action lawsuit against the IETF would
get public attention real fast...and not in a good light either for the
IETF.
Thomas Hruska
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