Email peering (Was: Economics of SPAM [Was: Micorsoft's Sender IDAuthentication......?]

Thu Jun 16 18:05:20 UTC 2005

Todd Vierling wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>>The proponents of "email peering" typically want to switch from the
>>>current model (millions of independant email servers) to a different
>>>model, with only a few big actors.
>>
>>I don't know who these proponents are, that you refer to. However,
>>in my earlier message I quite clearly described a model that allows
>>for millions of independent email servers organized in roughly
>>3 levels of hierarchy and I described how it could be done so
>>that email peering IS NOT LIMITED to a few big actors.
> 
> 
> You mean like ucbvax?  (If you don't know what that means, you have no
> business talking about Internet e-mail.)
> 
> Seriously, the mess you're proposing was already done.  It didn't scale.

I think the salient point is that BGP itself does not and would not 
scale to the same level of demand SMTP peering agreements would need.

Currently 160k prefixes and 16bit ASNs -- while in and of itself 
stretching many operators scaliability limits -- come nowhere close to 
millions of domain names, mailsystems, mail orgs, mail users and pieces 
of mail.

Aggregation is currently failing for BGP, there is no rational basis to 
assume it could even begin to make traction for SMTP.

Its a pipe dream.