Open source has no workable majority on numbers of mailboxes [LWN.net]

Open source has no workable majority on numbers of mailboxes

Posted Sep 9, 2004 20:45 UTC (Thu) by nigelm (subscriber, #622)
In reply to: Is Sender ID Dead in the Water? - No MARID Working Group Consensus (Groklaw) by pphaneuf
Parent article: Is Sender ID Dead in the Water? - No MARID Working Group Consensus (Groklaw)

The situation with MTAs and open source is a little more complex than counting installed systems.

The majority of mail is going to end up at one of the big providers - AOL, Outblaze, MSN, Hotmail and many more. The majority of legitimate mail also goes from the big players (the zombie SPAM cloud is a big load of machines, but hardly legitimate). Many of those use open source software, but will build and tailor the installation to their specific specs - when moving a few million messages per day a few percent improvement is a load of messages so optomisation can be worth it. Even if the provider is using GPL software they are quite free to add in GPL incompatible stuff for their own use - they just can't distribute it other than their internal deployment - and they can license Sender ID if their legal advice says to. This means that a majority of the potential email endpoints, and a majority of the legitimate email senders could end up using Sender ID even if the open source community in general shuns it, and they could leverage at least the requirement to publish appropriate domain records on the rest of the world if the rest of the world wants to talk to the big provider majority.

So despite open source having the majority of MTA boxes, it does not have a high level of control on the overall flow of mail. Sendmail has implemented Sender ID - although the interesting bit will be if the various distributions that carry sendmail will carry the Sender ID extensions - I expect the free ones not to, and the commercial Unix implementations maybe to carry it.

Nigel.

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But the big ISPs don't need Sender ID

Posted Sep 10, 2004 13:33 UTC (Fri) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link]

There's no need for the big ISPs to use anything like Sender ID. Because there are not many of them (even including the 50+ menbers of ESCP), they can share round their SenderID-style records very easily. The whole lot will fit on a single sheet of paper. I'd suspect they do something like this already, filtering out purported hotmail addresses that don't come from the correct IP block. And it would reduce the DNS load.

I think nigelm has hit the bullseye with "they could leverage at least the requirement to publish appropriate domain records on the rest of the world if the rest of the world wants to talk to the big provider majority". Think "follow the money".

Andrew Yeomans

Have you seen the ESPC's membership list?

Posted Sep 11, 2004 4:52 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The ESPC's membership list reads like a list of organisations whose main interest in getting rid of spam is to ensure that their e-mail is more visible when it lands in your mailbox; the big names on the list are companies like DoubleClick.