OT:Relays: Dumb question

Rumor has it that John Lawson may have mentioned these words: It's not in the specification. 3 problems: 1: Mailing lists (like this one) would not fare very well under your plan. The mailing lists that Jay, Sellam, I and many others would have to be licensed & would cost money, and many would just be shut down instead of incurring extra fees on "free" information. 2: Who gets the money? The gubbermint? Bill Gates? 3: How are you going to "license" foreign SMTP servers? We'll end up with what we have now: Honest people getting screwed whilst foreign (and US companies with foreign interests) spamming us from "across the pond" (left or right, your choice) devil-may-care. There have been a *lot* of people who *do* know the system inside & out, who haven't figured out this problem. There are a lot more people who *think* they've figured it out, only to have done it wrong. (TMDA[1], SPF[2], etc.) <MODE="Climbing up on horse he rode in on" ;-) > Then there are a few of us like me who know enough to know that the system cannot be repaired. The entire protocol is flawed for todays society (Remember, the basics for SMTP was written over 20 years ago, and the Internet was a totally different place then. Remember the first word in SMTP: [Simple] -> There's no simple solution for such a simplistic protocol.) and doesn't scale well with today's issues. SMTP needs to be dumped, and a new protocol put in place. A promising (but very young) answer is Dan Bernstein's IM2000. More can be found out about it here: http://www.im2000.org./ This protocol puts the storage burden on the sender, and eliminates bounces as the sender can easily check if the mail had ever been received by the intended party. It also makes it much easier to track the "bad guys" and block them from your system until they clean up their act. </MODE> Hey, I've resisted this flamewar for quite a while -- Now it's time for me to get out the naptha, vegetable oil, asbestos suit & Marshmallows!!! ;^> Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] TMDA isn't "technically" flawed as a *personal* mail watchdog *when set up right*, but many old-timers do get upset about having to confirm emails they know aren't spam, and most people don't set it up correctly. It also has no business as a site-wide "solution" as it cannot handle bounces/doublebounces & whatnot. [2] SPF *is* flawed. DomainKeys is a better implementation, but as my mother always used to say, "It's just perfume on a pig." SMTP is a pig, and should become porkchops. :-O -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch(a)30below.com |