> > Second, the fact that 10 years ago you set up sendmail for > > the computer club at your college doesn't make you an expert > > on modern large scale email systemms administration. The > > operational concerns for large-scale email setups today are > > very different from thost that would have applied to small > > scale setups a few years back. > > > > I'm not going to get into the insight real operational > > experience provides because I also lack the necessary > > operational experience to have an informed opinion. > To make good standards you need a broad selection of > informed opinion from different viewpoints. Why should > it not be as simple to set up an IETF standard email > system for a small organization as it was 10 years ago? You can lament the present-day realities until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that it is harder - much harder. I should know, because I was running such a system then, just as I do now. Just as one example - there are many others - back in 1998 there was no need for mandatory spam filtering (I first imposed mandatory filtering on all users on my systems back in 2002), That right there ups the complexity, not to mention the overhead, of operation by about an order of magnitude, and can easily have the effect of pushing the operational issues past what a local IT person with many other responsibilities is able to handle. > Definitely there are issues of scale that have to be > considered, but if the IETF really wanted to have large > scale email operators drive new Internet email standards > then we would hand the job over to MAAWG. You're completely missing the point. This issue isn't knowing how to build a large scale email system and I never said it was. Rather, the issue is whether or not people's opinions about the effectiveness of various antispam mechanisms are valid when all they have is a small amount of experience, often quite dated. Maybe it's just me, but I'll take the evidence presented by someone who has access to the operational statistics for a mail system that services 10s of millions of end users and handles thousands of outsourced email setups over someone like myself who runs a tiny little setup any day. > You are right that the quality of the discussion about > DNSBLs has not been too good. That is far too kind. > But the underlying problem > seems to be that dissenting voices did not participate in > the drafting of the DNSBL document, and therefore the document > writers had not found the right level of compromise to get > the dissenters on board. Anyone can claim to be a great expert > and write a standards document, but the real hard work is in > getting a group of people with differing backgrounds and > experience to agree with that standards document. You might want to review the actual discussion before making such claims. And while you're at it you might also want to explain how it would be possible to get views that are, to a close first approximation, summed up as "DNSBLs are evil incarnate" on board. Ned _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf