On 12/31/2013 4:32 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
It goes without saying that designing and deploying a new planetary
messaging system is not easy, but I do not want to be stuck with the
limitations of the deployed email system forever, and I do not want
end up stuck with a proprietary replacement instead.
Thia proposal fits a template in the form of:
1. Throw out existing email
2. Start over
3. The new system will fix major problems
It has been a popular refrain due to spam and other abuse, for at least
20 years. It is the template you are using, for proposing encrypted mail.
A decade or two or ago, I developed my own response template:
1. Specify the details of whatever functional improvements are
being proposed.
2. Gain community rough consensus in favor of those differences
from existing email.
3. Give the email technical community an opportunity to add the
changes to the existing infrastructure. There will come a point at
which some needed change can't be accommodated, but we've done
remarkably well over the last 35 years...
4. When we indeed fail to add the changes, then throw out existing
mail and start over.
I've never seen anyone get past step 2.
A useful response to my question would be to say, for instance, most
of the recently successful communication media are proprietary single
vendor systems, but a new email system necessarily must be federated.
Indeed, standards for truly distributed architectures do seem to be far
more difficult to gain adoption.
But note that proprietary, centralized architectures fail regularly too.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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