This is totally ignoring a few facts.
A: That the overwhelming majority of users don't have the slightest idea
what an MTA is, why they would want one, or how to install/configure
one. ISP/ESP hosted email is prevalent only partially to do with
technical reasons and a lot to do with technical apathy on the part of
the user base at large. Web hosting is the same way. A dedicated mailbox
appliance would be another cost to the user that they would not
understand why they need, and thus would not want. In a hypothetical
tech-utopia, where everyone was fluent in bash (or powershell, take your
pick), and read RFCs over breakfast instead of the newspaper, this would
be an excellent solution. Meanwhile, in reality, technology frightens
most people, and they are more than happy to pay someone else to deal
with it for them.
B: The relevant technical reason can be summarized as "good luck getting
a residential internet connection with a static IP"
(If your response includes the words "dynamic DNS" then please see point A)
(Also I'm just going to briefly touch the fact that this doesn't address
spam as a problem at all, and in fact would make that problem
overwhelmingly worse, as MTAs would be expected to accept mail from
everywhere, and we obviously can't trust end user devices or ISP CPE to
be secure against intrusion)
Scott Buettner
Front Range Internet Inc
NOC Engineer
On 3/26/2014 8:33 AM, Laszlo Hanyecz wrote:
Maybe you should focus on delivering email instead of refusing it. Or just
keep refusing it and trying to bill people for it, until you make yourself
irrelevant. The ISP based email made more sense when most end users - the
people that we serve - didn't have persistent internet connections. Today,
most users are always connected, and can receive email directly to our own
computers, without a middle man. With IPv6 it's totally feasible since unique
addressing is no longer a problem - there's no reason why every user can't have
their own MTA. The problem is that there are many people who are making money
off of email - whether it's the sending of mail or the blocking of it - and so
they're very interested in breaking direct email to get 'the users' to rely on
them. It should be entirely possible to build 'webmail' into home user CPEs or
dedicated mailbox appliances, and let everyone deal with their own email
delivery. The idea of having to pay other people to host email for you is as
obsolete as NAT-for-security, and this IPv6 SMTP thread is basically covering
the same ground. It boils down to: we have an old crappy system that works,
and we don't want to change, because we've come to rely on the flaws of it and
don't want them fixed. In the email case, people have figured out how to make
money doing it, so they certainly want to keep their control over it.
-Laszlo
On Mar 26, 2014, at 2:07 PM, Lamar Owen <lo...@pari.edu> wrote:
On 03/25/2014 10:51 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
[snip]
I would suggest the formation of an "IPv6 SMTP Server operator's club,"
with a system for enrolling certain IP address source ranges as "Active
mail servers", active IP addresses and SMTP domain names under the
authority of a member.
...
As has been mentioned, this is old hat.
There is only one surefire way of doing away with spam for good, IMO. No one
is currently willing to do it, though.
That way? Make e-mail cost; have e-postage. No, I don't want it either. But
where is the pain point for spam where this becomes less painful? If an
enduser gets a bill for sending several thousand e-mails because they got owned
by a botnet they're going to do something about it; get enough endusers with
this problem and you'll get a class-action suit against OS vendors that allow
the problem to remain a problem; you can get rid of the bots. This will trim
out a large part of spam, and those hosts that insist on sending unsolicited
bulk e-mail will get billed for it. That would also eliminate a lot of traffic
on e-mail lists, too, if the subscribers had to pay the costs for each message
sent to a list; I wonder what the cost would be for each post to a list the
size of this one. If spam ceases to be profitable, it will stop.
Of course, I reserve the right to be wrong, and this might all just be a pipe
dream. (and yes, I've thought about what sort of billing infrastructure
nightmare this could be.....)
