Re: Lazy network operators

[Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2004, Michael.Dillon () radianz com wrote:
> > Not everyone wants to (or is able to) entrust 
> > their email to a a Tier 1 ISP; if nothing else, the Tier 1s would 
> > charge for the privilege.
>
> A tier 1 provider in the SMTP mesh does not have to
> be the same thing as a tier 1 provider in the
> physical mesh. See the structure of the NNTP mesh
> over the years for examples. I fully expect to see
> specialized email peering providers arise who will
> have SMTP peering arrangements with the large email
> site like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. and who then arrange
> peering with large numbers of smaller sites who either
> cannot find SMTP peering locally or who want to
> be assured of alternate SMTP routes in the event
> their main peer cannot reach all destinations.

.. and then I pay my upstream for the privilege of them sending
my mail along for me? All of that equipment so a bunch of
universities can feed their upstream a whole chunk of email
reliably isn't exactly going to be cheap. These specialised
email providers are going to have to have _some_ form of
transit to handle 'just email', increasing the cost.

I wonder how many backbone providers want to run their own
email gateways for all email passing through their network
and have to provide some form of guaranteed service to their
customers.

I wonder how this is going to affect SMTP mail handling as
it stands - for example, how many 'hops' will there be
between this university's mail gateway and, say, MIT's
mail gateway(s)? Will people start playing header rewrite
tricks so MTAs around the world don't bomb out with
"exceeded hop count" ? "Just one hop!" games, a la IP routing in
the final stages of last century, may rear its ugly head again.

I don't believe comparing this to NNTP is entirely valid -
you don't have the overhead of multiple crazy NNTP server
implementations causing you the utmost of pain; you don't have
to worry about handling bounces and temporary DNS failures along
each path; article routing (whether you chose push or pull)
was much, much simpler.





Adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd                    I'm only a fanboy if
<adrian () creative net au>         I emailed Wesley Crusher.