Internet Email Services Association

Tue Mar 1 16:39:33 UTC 2005

> | The key thing here is that there is some kind of contractual agreement
> | between the second tier and the core members. If the second tier 
breaks
> | the agreement, their email flow is summarily cut off. You can do that
> | with contracts.
> 
> Yup.
> 
> As you've mentioned, we already have a mechanism for peering between
> providers - it's called BGP.  Is it too much to ask for BGP peering
> contracts to include requirements to deal with abuse ?

Yes, I think that it is too much to ask for.
Abuse has little to no impact on peering beyond
minor traffic increments. Why should a BGP peering
contract place a lot of importance on this? Certainly,
BGP peering contracts do include some mention of 
abuse contacts and so on, but it is a side issue.

However, when you consider email services, it
is a different story. Whether it is abuse or
whether it is shoddy email operations or whether
it is misconfigured email server software, it WILL
create major impacts on the quality of the email
service. Most of this isn't even noticed by the 
NOC because they only care that packets flow smoothly.
In order to improve the quality of Internet email
service, we need more than the smooth flow of packets.
We need the right packets in the right place at
the right time, and only the right packets.

--Michael Dillon