Re: A new SMTP "3821" [Re: FTC stuff...........]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Alan DeKok wrote:

>   It's not 1984.  20 years have gone by.  SMTP won those wars and all
> of the protocol wars which followed.  No one is arguing that we should
> replace SMTP with X.400, or any other non-SMTP scheme.  I'm not one of
> the X.400 people.

I've argued and will be happy to argue again that SMTP needs to be 
replaced with new protocol entirely instead of putting more and more
band-aids on 20 year old protocol that was designed for "simple" mail
transactions.

But creating new mail protocol to replace SMTP would take long time
(both in terms of IETF process to create this new protocol and process 
for it to achieve wide-spread adaption) and spam is a serious problem
in our current and immediate situation of using email so we have to
do something with what we have (i.e. SMTP) to get this under control
and only after that can we take a look at entire thing and see if we
can come up with something better taking into the account all the
lessons with have learned with what works and what does not in SMTP.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
[email protected]