On 10/26/2015 1:01 PM, Ted Lemon wrote: > My experience of "badly broken": pre-filter, for my email address > (mellon@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:mellon@xxxxxxxxx>) alone, spam is currently > arriving at a rate of about three messages per minute. Why? Because > the design assumptions for email did not account for the fact that in > the wild, email is an ecosystem, not a cooperative venture, and there is > money to be made with scattershot spam, and money to be made filtering it. For 25-30 years, the email system we use now wasn't "in the wild". The service was developed, operated and used in a more constrained environment. Failure to anticipate massive and fundamental changes in a computing and communication environment, decades hence, is not exactly a design failure. A problem, of course. But that's different from a failure. On the other hand, assessing it as a failure fits into an increasingly common template of changing the email operating environment's rules and then suddenly reclassifying usage which worked fine in the past as now being a 'violation'. > The amount of brainpower that’s required to keep this rickety train on > the rails is astonishing. It is no longer the case that someone like > you or I with the resources of an individual can have a reasonably > painless experience of operating an SMTP server. To my mind, this > means that SMTP does not "work." If I'm reading your text correctly, you are saying that the fact that a service that was once simple to operate but that now requires extensive staffing and expertise subjects the service to an assessment of 'does not work'? Yet I'm pretty sure that that kind of transition from simplicity to complexity that requires staffing and expertise is the hallmark of many (all?) infrastructure services in all technologically developed cultures. Few consumers operate their own telephone exchange or their own air traffic control center or their own water purification center or... d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net