Re: Email Portability Approved by Knesset Committee

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tom Goltz <tgoltz () QuietSoftware com>
Date: February 22, 2010 2:04:54 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org>
Subject: Re: [IP] Email Portability Approved by Knesset Committee

At 11:19 AM 2/22/2010, Gadi Evron wrote:
> > The email portability bill has just been approved by the Knesset's committee for legislation, sending it on its way 
> > for the full legislation process of the Israeli parliament.
> >
> > While many users own a free email account, many in Israel still make use of their ISP's email service.
> >
> > According to this proposed bill, when a client transfers to a different ISP the email address will optionally be his 
> > to take along, "just like" mobile providers do today with phone numbers.
> >
> > This new legislation makes little technological sense, and will certainly be a mess to handle operationally as well 
> > as beurocratically, but it certainly is interesting, and at least the notion is beautiful.

Given the fact that the underlying technology of the SMTP protocol cannot implement this in a rational fashion, the 
expedient response by the connectivity providers (ISP's) is to cease bundling email services with their connectivity 
service.

The only way I can see to implement this on a distributed basis would be to extend DNS MX records to allow a domain to 
publish individual MX records for say, "bob () isp net" and "joe () isp net"  This assumes that the entity that 
operates "isp.net" still exists and actively maintains the "isp.net" DNS entries.  Lacking that, you'd need to allow 
arbitrary third parties to publish MX records for "@isp.net", which opens a GIANT security hole which would allow 
anyone with a mail server to hijack ANY email address.  For all of this to work "right", it would have to be 
implemented by every mail server on the Internet, not just the ones in Israel.

The obvious way to implement this would mandate that ALL email messages in Israel must be routed through a single 
centralized SMTP server that knows how to route each email address to it's correct local SMTP server...a delightful 
concept for centralized government monitoring of email.






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