Marc,
This is like solving the Suzuki Samauri rollover problem by making
a newer, wider standard for road widths so that the automakers can make
wider cars.
After all the current road width standard is set the way it is because
of Roman chariots which specified that the road needed to be wide enough
for 2 horses.
If you think about it, if we added a few feet in width to semi trucks
we would save millions of gallons of diesel fuel every year, reduce many
thousands of trucks on the road, and reduce the chance of a truck rollover.
It is an engineering solution that is utterly practical, and would
work perfectly - from an engineering standpoint.
But it is completely impractical and impossible from a common sense
standpoint.
Just like your suggestion of changing the SMTP standard.
Eric Allman himself, inventor of the SMTP standard, has repeatedly
said that what happened with SMTP was predictable. SMTP -HAD- to be
open and flexible to work in the first place, and that flexibility
caused it to be widely adopted - then once widely adopted, that
flexibility itself is now a problem. If the SMTP standard had been
tighter in the beginning so that people would like it today, then it
never would have been adopted, and instead some other, flexible and
open standard would have been adopted - and we would be exactly where
we are now.
I submit that many things in life are like this and you can't do
anything about it other than to just shrug your shoulders and let it be.
Ultimately, in the far future, e-mail itself will become obsolete
by something else, just as e-mail today is obsoleting paper mail.
Maybe at that time we will have a chance to do it right.
Ted
On 12/1/2010 7:27 AM, Marc Perkel wrote:
I've been thinking about what it would take to actually eliminate spam
or reduce it to less than 10% of what it is now. One of the problems is
the SMTP protocol itself. And a big problem with that is that mail
servers talk to each other using the same protocol as users use to talk
to servers.
Rather than get all users to change maybe it would be easier to get
server software to change. This transition can be done by making server
software that can do both protocols to maintain compatibility but will
use the new protocol if both sides are capable of talking at that level.
I'm not sure what the specification of the new protocol should be but it
should at least be different than what email clients use so that server
to server communication isn't the same as client to server
communication. Perhaps server protocols can have more authentication
information that would protect them from being spoofed. But having
something different - even if it's just a port change - is better than
what we have now.
Thoughts?
(sorry about posting the same message to the dev list. My mistake)
