Re: Complaint of the week: Ebay abuse mail (slightly OT)

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 13:38:37 BST, Michael.Dillon () radianz com  said:

> The web of trusted email servers would use a new and improved mail 
> transfer protocol (NIMTP) that would only be used to exchange email 
> between trusted servers. Users could continue to use authenticated SMTP to 
> initiate the sending of email, but nobody would accept any unauthenticated 
> SMTP servers any more.

And this would deploy how?  In particular, consider the following questions:

1) What *immediate* benefits do you get if you are among the first to deploy?
(For instance, note that you can't stop accepting "plain old SMTP" till
everybody else deploys).

2) Who bears the implementation cost when a site deploys, and who gets the
benefit? (If it costs *me* to deploy, but *you* get the benefit, why do I want
to do this?)

3) What percentage of sites have to deploy before it makes a real difference,
and what incremental benefit is there to deploying before that? (For any given
scheme that doesn't fly unless 90% or more of sites do it, explain how you
bootstrap it).

4) Does the protocol still keep providing benefit if everybody deploys it?
(This is a common problem with SpamAssassin-like content filters - if most
sites filter phrase "xyz", spammers will learn to not use that phrase).

If you have a *serious* proposal that actually passes all 4 questions (in
other words, it provides immediate benefit to early adopters, and still
works when everybody does it), bring it on over to 'asrg () ietf org'.

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