Replacing email protocols: First comes consensus on the requirements

[Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net>]

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
> It might be a good idea to get to work on a new
> mail architecture which would replace SMTP, POP,
> SUBMIT and IMAP. At least now we know the use-cases 
> very well including many corner cases exploited by
> criminals in their businesses.


Standard response to common, blanket call for replacing current Internet Mail 
protocols...

<mantra>

When you:

   1. Get anything that looks like a community consensus about the functional 
requirements for email that are not being met,

   2. Try to add them to existing email protocols, and

   3. Fail

Then it will make sense to discuss replacement protocols.

Over the last 10 years, there have already been many attempts at the first step 
and they have quickly failed.

Independent of the social and political problems of gaining consensus, the 
functional difficulty is in defining changes that do not cripple the ability of 
email to support the very wide range of human communication styles for which it 
is needed.

It is trivial to design changes that cover only a narrow range of styles. 
Although a wrong-headed path, even then, the hard question is *which* narrow range?

Email abuse is a social phenomenon, not a technical one.  Nothing will make it 
disappear.

The best we can hope for is to reduce it to tolerable levels, the same as for 
any other criminal activity elsewhere in many societies.

</mantra>


d/

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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