[51205] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal at smtpng.org
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Knowles)
Wed Aug 21 19:39:13 2002
In-Reply-To:
<Pine.LNX.4.33.0208211403040.17637-100000@sokol.elan.net>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 01:08:52 +0200
To: <william@elan.net>, <nanog@nanog.org>
From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 2:15 PM -0700 2002/08/21, <william@elan.net> wrote:
> Your quite wrong. With email we do in fact know "phone" for the calling
> party - its their FROM address and for callback we can specify if we trust
> or do not trust the other party to provide some different domain, so they
> may not be given a change to specify where to callback to. As example If
> they are trying to send email from <me@somedomain.com> the callback would
> have to go to somedomain.com mail server and the callback must use the
> authorization code given during initial mail call. The callback can also be
> authenticated with TLS giving even more security that somedomain.com is a
> real operation. This will prevent 99% of spammers just there.
It's bad enough waiting for DNS responses so that you can
determine whether or not the envelope sender domain even exists. Now
you want to slow down every single e-mail transaction by many, many,
many orders of magnitude so that you can do a callback on each and
every connection?!?
Man, wanna talk about ideas that would bring all e-mail to a
complete stop across the entire Internet? Imagine what it would be
like if AOL did this, so that it could take five, ten, or even
fifteen minutes just to get one callback on one message, if the
remote server was slow enough. Now, if you start up a sendmail queue
runner every sixty minutes, you only need a very small number of
messages in your queue before you start stacking up more and more and
more sendmail processes, until such time as you run out of memory,
your mail server crashes, and you might potentially lose all your
queued e-mail.
Jeezus. Do you have to be the one guy who got blamed for
shutting down all e-mail across the entire Internet on "Black
Tuesday", just to see the flaws in this plan?!?
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E W+++(--) N+ !w---
O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)
