Re: Why is SMTP still relevant?

On 06/18/07 04:39, John Wallace wrote:
"Ron Johnson" <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:p50di.582903$2Q1.250900@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 06/16/07 20:04, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
[snip]
So, what is the technological solution?
Hardened operating systems and some sort of email-account
pre-registration with organizations that issue web-of-trust PGP/GPG
digital signatures. Every user would need to think of a strong
passphrase before being allowed to send email. All emails would
have to be signed. Using computers and the internet would become
*much* more complicated and usage would plummet.

Computers would then only be used by geeks and other sundry
propeller-heads and technophiles. Life will be good again!

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!

(long post, sorry)

You just (almost) described some of the attributes of an X.400
standards-based secure email system, at least as I used to understand them
some considerable time ago. Apart from the complexity bit of course;
internal complexity does not necessarily have to be exposed to the user or
(mostly) to the administrator (VMS is a prime example).

[snip]

Anyone care to enlighten me as to why a "paradigm shift" (ouch) to X.400
isn't the answer and band-aids are? I do realise that such a shift wouldn't
take place overnight and that interoperability tools would be needed (which
is fine, they existed years ago). I also realise there is a whole
SMTP-dependent ecosystem out there, from mailserver vendors to band-aid
vendors to ISPs to spammers and more, whose interests will not be best
served if the underlying mail system suddenly loses the vulnerabilities on
which their commercial activities depend, and there are staff who won't want
their SMTP skills to become irrelevant, but is this really the main reason
SMTP survives well beyond its "use by" date? There's also the "not invented
here" factor, X.400 didn't come from the Internerd/RFC community, it came
from those nasty telco folks, but twenty-odd years later doesn't the reality
look like the telcos may have been the ones going the right way, maybe they
were just a bit before the cheap computing power (and bandwidth) was
available?

Installed base. There are a *lot* of SMTP servers out there.

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
.

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