E-Mail authentication fight looming: Microsoft pushing Sender ID

Thu Jun 23 13:44:00 UTC 2005

On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 06:39:07PM -0700, william(at)elan.net wrote:
> P.S. It would really be great if IETF remained true to its origin
> and goals did did technical reviews and selected proposals based on
> the technical capabilities and not on what large company is exerting 
> pressure on them (especially not by means of press announcements).

Yes, it would.  It would also be great if the IETF realized that there is
really very little need for email authentication: (a) forgery is a minor
problem compared to spam, and even solving the forgery problem completely
(which isn't gonna happen) would have a temporary and negligible effect on
spam; (b) the authentication problem can't be "solved" anyway until the
complete lack of security on hundreds of millions of network endpoints
is "solved"; and (c) the originating IP address of any SMTP connection
tells you _exactly_ who is responsible for that traffic, whatever it
turns out to be.

---Rsk