Research-y (IPv6)

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I'm going to have one more go at sending email to this list to determine
if the list owner has finally fixed the censoring block (it's hardly
"anti-spam" if it discards irrespective of content) -- which means that
everything I have tried to say so far has been discarded...

- -=-=-

In message <[email protected]>, Barry Shein
<[email protected]> writes

>Here's a research-y topic:
>
>How will the various expansions of the network space affect spam and
>related? Can we put more flesh on these bones than "a lot!"

we could probably say, "not very much"

>1. IPv6 address space expansion

Some people seem determined to continue to give reputations to IPv6
addresses (rather than moving to some other descriptor). That means that
in such a world it is entirely rational for large providers (where large
might be a 100 customer ESP company, or a brand with x00 million
customers) their own IPv6 address (range?) each.

That way each individual marketer or each individual webmail account
holder gets to maintain their own reputation -- and the recipient system
can check the reputation without all the hassle of parsing From: data
and checking the crypto is sufficiently valid to trust it.

This will be a mess, but a relatively tractable one ...

For everyone else it's merely a case of documenting the cut-point (the
size of their IPv6 allocation) and treating every address within that
range the same. Whether we'll see public services providing data about
cut point or whether you will buy in the dataset from reputation
specialists is currently unclear.

However this may never happen.

It is quite possible that  IPv6 will only ever (for a decade or more) be
used for mail transfer from end users to smarthosts (where possession of
appropriate local identification credentials will be what matters) --
and smarthosts will continue to talk solely over IPv4 to each other ...

Essentially the ecosystem will treat possession of an IPv4 address as a
"clue test" and it will be seen as an easy way of excluding end user
address space without all the bother of consulting incomplete databases
or speculatively parsing reverse DNS strings

>Seems like a big subject
>, yet important enough to be able to say some
>general words on each topic as a group.

The actual research is to document, on an ongoing basis, the amount of
email transferred between MTAs by IPv6 -- preferably excluding the
"early adopter" community who have been doing it in order to provide PR
for IPv6 rather than because of any real perceived value.

- -- 
Dr Richard Clayton                         <[email protected]>
                                  tel: 01223 763570, mobile: 07887 794090
                    Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB3 0FD

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