Replacing email protocols: First comes consensus on the requirements

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Michael.Dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
It might be a good idea to get to work on a new
mail architecture which would replace SMTP, POP,
SUBMIT and IMAP. At least now we know the use-cases very well including many corner cases exploited by
criminals in their businesses.


Standard response to common, blanket call for replacing current Internet Mail protocols...

<mantra>

When you:

1. Get anything that looks like a community consensus about the functional requirements for email that are not being met,

   2. Try to add them to existing email protocols, and

   3. Fail

Then it will make sense to discuss replacement protocols.

Over the last 10 years, there have already been many attempts at the first step and they have quickly failed.

Independent of the social and political problems of gaining consensus, the functional difficulty is in defining changes that do not cripple the ability of email to support the very wide range of human communication styles for which it is needed.

It is trivial to design changes that cover only a narrow range of styles. Although a wrong-headed path, even then, the hard question is *which* narrow range?

Email abuse is a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Nothing will make it disappear.

The best we can hope for is to reduce it to tolerable levels, the same as for any other criminal activity elsewhere in many societies.

</mantra>


d/

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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