Paul Vixie via mailop wrote: > all of these actors might be "trying to make things work" but be taking a > naive or ignorant or provincial or subjective view of both "things" and > "work".
By trying to make things work I was thinking of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE, and DNSBLs, and other, and the list goes on. To keep the noise down so that email is usable. (I might predict that a decade from now all of those will be considered completely obsolete and it will be a completely new set of defenses with new set of requirements. Except instead I think it will be all of those and additionally that same amount again of something new and different. It's difficult to learn all at once now. It's hard enough keeping up with the developments as they develop.) > none of these actors might think of themselves as miscreants or even be > thinking in terms of the public good. I was mosty thinking of the spammers who are always trying new things in order to slip their messages through the filters. Which breaks things. Because spam noise is so bad people on the receiving end react in often reactionary ways (Please make it stop!) and then break things in order to avoid the noise. I don't really blame them. Any port in a storm. We all have taken shortcuts that we hoped were temporary to reduce a problem somewhat. Block an IP address? Sure. The /24 neighborhood? Yup. It's from OVH, Digital Ocean, Linode? Let's block all of that hosting center. Just examples of behavior I think is undesirable. (Yet I definitely have /24 networks in my own block lists.) But that really creates problems for the concept of distributed email. If any operator that is NOT Too Big To Block has their entire hosting network blocked then only those that are Too Big To Block will remain. And those very small ones that no one knows about. With nothing in between. The big get bigger and the small get smaller. Bob _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
