RE: Problems sending mail to yahoo?

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> Filtering stinks.  It is resource-intensive, time-consuming, 
> error-prone, and pretty much an example of something that is 
> desperately flagging "the current e-mail system is failing."

Hear, hear!

> You want to define standards?  Let's define some standard for 
> establishing permission to mail.  If we could solve the 
> permission problem, then the filtering wouldn't be such a 
> problem, because there wouldn't need to be as much (or maybe 
> even any).  As a user, I want a way to unambiguously allow a 
> specific sender to send me things, "spam" filtering be 
> damned.  I also want a way to retract that permission, and 
> have the mail flow from that sender (or any of their 
> "affiliates") to stop.
>
> Right now I've got a solution that allows me to do that, but 
> it requires a significant paradigm change, away from 
> single-e-mail-address.

In general, your "permission to send" idea is a good one to
put in the requirements list for a standard email architecture.
But your particular solution stinks because it simply adds
another bandage to a creaky old email architecture that is 
long past its sell-by date.

IMHO, the only way that Internet email can be cleaned up is
to create an entirely new email architecture using an entirely
new set of protcols with entirely new port assignments and 
no attempt whatsoever to maintain reverse compatibility with
the existing architecture. That is a fair piece of work and
requires a lot of people to get their heads out of the box
and apply some creativity. Many will say that the effort is
doomed before it starts because it is not compatible with
what went before. I don't buy that argument at all.

In any case, a new architecture won't come about until we have
some clarity of the requirements of the new architecture. And
that probably has to be hashed out somewhere else, not on any
existing mailing list.

--Michael Dillon