Dumping SMTP: transport and identity are not the issues; spontaneous association is the issue
Eric Rescorla rebuts the arguments for giving up on SMTP: Should we dump SMTP?:
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The movement to ditch SMTP strikes me as more of a howl of frustration at our collective inability to deal with spam than an actual reasoned argument for change.
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[Via Ed Felten: Email Redesign Not Helpful]
The big design issue is not transport security or authentication. It is whether spontaneous association is a desired feature, and how such associations are managed or controlled. Since most mailboxes do want to be found (that’s why people publish email addresses in directories and on web pages), re-doing SMTP might yield fresh transport and identity protocols (already available as succinctly described by Rescorla), but would be just as vulnerable to spam, unless something is done to improve association management and its hooks to content filtering. And, while it is interesting to describe a new world in which I can only correspond with people to whom I have been introduced and with whom I maintain a web of credibility, there is a very important question:
Do people really want this, or do they only say they want this?
