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

Thu Jun 16 19:21:42 UTC 2005

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Todd Vierling wrote:

>
> On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>
>>> You're lost in the past.  Study history and stop repeating it back to us.
>
>> Although I agree that email peering is a seriously bad idea, I don't
>> think that the analogy to uucp is correct.
>
> You're right -- I left out the routing table bit, which also existed some
> time ago.  BITNET used the bitnet.links file; here's an old one still
> accessible for viewing:
>
>    http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/host-tables/bitnet.links
>
> Similar concept, same scaling problems; it just hides the explicit routing
> from the user (as would any modern "peering" system, presumably).

And just to add to it all, you might want to compare to another similar
system - FidoNet with its nodelist routing files.

Randy Bush is probably right person to ask but I have had a feeling in 
1994 that its routing system would not be able to deal with all the people 
that want to be connected to global email system. But of course we end 
with everyone switching to internet and its no longer a problem (and 
fidonet zones now are either smaller or same size as 10 years ago).

And also consider that fidonet does have hierarchical address which
makes routing decisions easier. With internet and majority of users
using email addresses in TLDs (or country SLDs which is the same),
there is no such hierarchy available.

So my opinion is that email peering is not workable as far as solution
for entire internet. But some of it may be of use in very limited scale
between certain very large providers as internal whitelisting system.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net