Re: We need an architecture, not finger pointing.

[Ted Lemon <ted.lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 28, 2015, at 4:28 PM, Ned Freed <ned.freed@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In any case, the bottom line is you're jumping to conclusions about a vast
infrastructure that's currently handling in excess of a trillion messages a day
based on what appears to be little more than your personal experience. And I
must say if your experience is what you say it is, it's more than a little
atypical.

Er, the big mail services mostly just silently drop mail they don’t like, as far as I can tell, and they don’t tend to do policies like we’re discussing here: they just evaluate how likely the mail is to be something the reader wants to see, and deliver it or junk it on that basis.   You are right that they do a very good job of it, but it’s quite an expensive job, and that’s part of my criticism: it need not be nearly so expensive, and it need not be something only big companies can do.

This conversation is specifically about a problem with IETF mailing lists, so the points I was making do apply here.   I am in fact curious to hear if the big mail providers are doing things like what I described in the previous message—if so, that’s cool in principle.   But if it’s not described in the RFCs, you haven’t actually contradicted the point I was making, which is that it ought to be reflected in the standards.