Re: [Asrg] 1. Inventory of Problems - SMTP

["Alan DeKok" <aland@ox.org>]

Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com> wrote:
> 1. SMTP is equivalent to a link-level, point-to-point protocol. As
> such, it has plenty of negative feedback and congestion control.

  Which is why people using Greylisting have shown it to be useless.

  Hmm... that doesn't sound right.  Ah, that's it: "plenty != sufficient"

> The larger mail service is a classic datagram model, like UDP. And,
> no, it has no congestion control. However as one contemplates this
> problem, keep in mind the challenge of doing meaningful end-to-end
> congestion control in the face of multi-day latencies.

  I don't see constructive criticism on the *technical* merits of the
documents.  Vague generalities sound helpful, but don't contribute
meaningfully to achieving any end goal.

> 2. I think folks are trying to make the underlying transport service
> be responsible for higher-level, user-to-user problems.

  Not me.  I'm looking at tweaking the underlying transport service so
it's less amenable to being abused by user-to-user problems.

> Remember that spam is a social problem, not a technical one.

  Ah.  So the technical flaws in SMTP which *enable* spammers are
meaningless.  The "joe jobbing" and forgery associated with the
attempted theft of account information are direct results of those
technical flaws...  but addressing those flaws is a low priority, as
spam is a social problem, not a technical one.

> So, worry about the end-to-end object/envelope, rather than the
> hop-by-hop transfer protocool.

  I'm sorry Dave, but everything I see from you can be paraphrased as
"SMTP is perfect.  Let's do nothing technical to solve this problem."

  Alan DeKok.

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