--On Thursday, October 29, 2015 01:33 +0000 Ted Lemon
<Ted.Lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I am curious to know whether the various participants in this
> conversation are planning to be in Yokohama, and whether, if
> so, they might be interested in an f2f discussion on this
> topic.
Ted, while I would be interested in such a discussion, I will
not be in Yokohama. I might be able to participate in a
discussion remotely, but that could equally be held at some
other time and, as you point out, some of us do better f2f.
>...
> some of what was designed in
> the good old days before the first green card spam didn't
> survive contact with the enemy, and I think we can do better.
Some of the people involved in this discussion are aware that
I've had one mailbox or folder (among many) that has migrated
among machines and domains but has basically existed for more
than 35 years (yes, it predates SMTP). During that time, not a
single spam or other unwanted message has been deposited in it.
Its ideas of valid credentials have evolved over the years but
the basic entry condition is that the sender (and sender
address) must not just be whitelisted but must be able to prove
that the message came from that sender. Now those constraints
are clearly impossible for general purpose use, if only because
they imply that senders must be pre-qualified in some way before
messages are accepted. But the point, as usual, is that there
are tradeoffs in all of this, many of which would exist even if
we junked the current mail environment and went to a single-hop
environment (something that I continue to believe is impossible
in practice, even without the spam problem).
> In particular, I find the mass aggregation of email
> discomfiting for a variety of reasons, privacy being one,
> horrible usernames being another,
Indeed. Even if one moves beyond privacy issues to concerns
about law enforcement access with all of the trappings, there is
a huge practical difference between "dear third party, give us
everything in Ted's mailbox and don't tell Ted we asked/demanded
it" and "dear Ted, give us everything in your mailbox and don't
tell Ted... whoops".
> and part of my motivation
> for being a gadfly about this is that I would really like to
> figure out if it's possible for people and companies that
> aren't Google or Yahoo to have any hope of participating in a
> global email transport system anymore.
If the answer is "no" and the earlier comment that email
standards are set today, not by an open process but by a handful
of large providers working in concert (including those two),
then one meeting that ought to be held, with appropriate lawyers
present, would discuss a class action antitrust suit against the
companies involved. It could be more effective, interesting,
and profitable than whining on the IETF list and, given that
standards-setting hypothesis, would presumably be prerequisite
to any real progress.
john