Re: Public Policy and Consumer ISP Hygiene (was Comcastpop-ups)

[chris () blask org]

--- On Sat, 10/17/09, G. D. Fuego <gdfuego () gmail com> wrote:

> DKIM is optional and not widely implemented.  
.snip.

> Of course none of this matters unless we could coordinate a
> shift off of smtp, which would likely be about as fast as 
> the IPv6 migration unless there was a simple migration path. 

This is the most important piece (more important than technical elegance): the willingness/ability to adopt the 
solution.  IPv6 adoption is glacial/dead because nobody gives a squirrel's heinie about it, the same will be true for 
every mail solution that doesn't give people an intrinsic jolt of GS (Gottahaveit Syndrome).

IMHO, a sender-authentication system that runs over SMTP and allows at least *some* mail to be highly-verifiable as 
known-good - and that was easy to adopt at the user level - could spread like wild fire and drive adoption and 
refinement thereby reducing the value of spam to near-zero.  (fwiw I think this would require some amount of strong 
auth to work at all) 

An outright replacement system for SMTP as a whole strikes me as extremely unlikely.  The amount of inertia to push 
against dictates that the alternative would have to be outrageously beneficial and that benefit would have to be 
overwhelmingly demonstrable or it would never be able to build the necessary momentum.

-chris


      

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