I don't have the same overall feeling that its less reliable.
I believe it is 100% reliable when it comes to the "good"
communications, the serious stuff, the work, business communications.
Those get through and more importantly, above all, when there is a
problem, good people complain, any email related problem is solved. On
the other hand, "bad guys" don't complain, that includes the spammers.
I guess, in that sense, if you (speaking in general) are in the spamming
business, part of a commercial bulk mailing business, then business is
probably finding it harder to try to reach the eyeballs of end users.
SMTP systems are doing more of the filtering at the SMTP level - a
Systems Level versus Users level, and at the user level, the online MUA
(web interfaces), the backend has done a tremendous job in
sorting/filtering spam into "Junk Folders." Offline i.e. POP3, unless
the user spent the effort to write the rules, its all in the same inbox.
In this sense, it is less reliable for the DMA, Spammers, etc, to get
their mail to the eyeballs of users.
Lets also consider there is a higher (intentional) ignorance factor.
Something we just don't wish to reply to a message received and read.
That would be akin to a phone call with caller ID and we ignore it,
don't answer it. In that vain, caller id has lowered the reliability
of the phone protocol call being answered. We do that total with SMTP
connection filters, where the connection is immediately dropped (socket
is closed).
All that doesn't make it unreliability - its done by design. It works.
--
HLS
On 4/10/2013 7:07 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 04/10/2013 06:55 PM, John Levine wrote:
There seems to be a faction that feel that 15 years ago someone once
blacklisted them and caused them some inconvenience, therefore all
DNSBLs suck forever. I could say similar things about buggy PC
implementations of TCP/IP, but I think a few things have changed since
then, in both cases.
There's an inherent problem with letting 3rd parties affect email
traffic, especially when there's no way to hold those 3rd parties
accountable for negligence or malice.
Like I said, things have changed since 1996.
Indeed they have. Email is much less reliable now than it was then.
Keith