Subject: RE: DEPLOY: Rejection of Sender ID does not result in standardiza tion of SPF Classic

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 21:08:13 -0700

> Rand Wacker writes:
> 
> > fine, that's the choice of the group.  No-one here should 
> be under the
> > impression that scuttling Sender ID at this time will give 
> SPF Classic any
> > fast track through the standards process.
> 
> That's fine.  You might want to study the evolution of NNTP.  
> There, lack of 
> the official IETF stamp of approval did not inhibit NNTP from 
> evolving.  If 
> you try to implement NNTP based only on IETF's standards-track 
> documentation, you won't get very far.

Are you saying that NNTP is a good example of protocol design?
Or a good example of creating a widely supported feature set?

I don't think either really holds. NNTP was in any case established
and the RFC published before the date of the first IETF meeting
and long before there was a defined IETF process.

NNTP chews up about four orders of bandwidth more bandwidth than it
needs to. The protcol set is poorly standardized and the application
has failed to meet the problems of spam, trolls and other social 
issues.

There is a reason why NNTP has been replaced by the blogosphere.

---

From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 09:17:17 +0200

Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes:
> Are you saying that NNTP is a good example of protocol design? Or a 
> good example of creating a widely supported feature set?

It's an example of a protocol that's evolved outside anyone's control. 
In my impression, it's evolved without accompanying documentation. Very 
inconvenient for implementers.

Arnt

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From: Koen Martens <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 10:12:27 +0200

> There is a reason why NNTP has been replaced by the blogosphere.

And that reason is spam. Not bad protocol design.

-- 
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
Networking, embedded systems, unix expertise, artificial intelligence.
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---

From: Sam Varshavchik <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 09:50:50 -0400

> Or a good example of creating a widely supported feature set?

NNTP works.  It has survived the onslaught of spam far better than SMTP.  I 
may be see one or two spam message a week across all the newsgroups I'm 
subscribed to.  And NNTP's evolution was outside of the IETF process.

> and long before there was a defined IETF process.

The early versions of NNTP, perhaps.  The NNTP of today has evolved far 
beyond those early days.

> needs to.

I don't think so.

>           The protcol set is poorly standardized and the application

That's not what I'm seeing.  I see hundreds of thousands of independent 
nodes; excellent propagation, certainly no worse than SMTP.

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From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 12:17:25 -0400 (EDT)

> subscribed to.  And NNTP's evolution was outside of the IETF process.

We haven't carried Usenet news for years, now.  I'll have to check
somewhere see how spam-free Usenet is.  And maybe its because many of the
groups are now moderated.  Or maybe its because NNTP is particularly
efficient about spam and the cancel-bot** wars have stopped.  All a
spammer needs to do is post one message a week to a group to make sure
that everyone in the group gets it once a week.  Cross-posting the same
message to many groups means that you see it only once for all of those
groups.

Moderated mailing lists have also had less problem that unmoderated lists,
even though it is trivial to forge an on-list from address to post on a
(subscriber-only) moderated list.  I've always found it strange that
abusers are so 'ethical' that they don't forge from addresses to get on
moderated lists. 

		--Dean

[** The cancel-bot wars were when usenet news admins would cancel spam
posts.  The spammers would then repost the message.  This process was
automated on both sides, and the result was thousands of spam messages to
a group. This made many groups unreadable. Spammers were blamed, but the
fault was just as much on the people who were doing the canceling, since
the groups were unmoderated and Usenet never had any kind of
non-commercial nature.]

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From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 13:07:58 -0400

> abusers are so 'ethical' that they don't forge from addresses to get on

  They do.  Not often, but they do.  I can't find the articles now,
but I have seen them in the past few months.

  In addition, I'm regularly receiving spam "from" people I've
exchanged messages with on public lists.  It's clearly forged, but the
spammers obviously believe that such forgery is useful.

  Alan DeKok.