That much trouble? [LWN.net]

That much trouble?

Posted Sep 5, 2004 20:29 UTC (Sun) by nigelm (subscriber, #622)
In reply to: That much trouble? by philips
Parent article: Debian rejects Sender ID

> Why just not try to develop another protocol and finally retire POP3/SMTP/IMAP?

Well its only SMTP thats an issue here. And the problem is that its a hard problem, and you have an installed based of many millions or maybe billions of installations - and you want to just sweep this away?

You can only do end to end identity management of email if you have a close user group of some sort. Now of course MS could provide that (and AOL used to) - and leave the rest of the world on the outside.

As for the comparisons against ssh, well yes, if you only want the small number of people who can ssh into your boxes be able to email you, then thats fine. I personally need to email people I have never had previous contact with. And I get legit emails from a lot of other people that I have had no previous relationship with, and not even any link to the ISP or company.

If I really wanted full end to end management I might use X400 - but there are reasons thats damn close to dead.

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