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Email suffers from one of it's early defining operational principals which was to be backwards compatible forever. In this way, operators still have to decide

Email suffers from one of it's early defining operational principals which was to be backwards compatible forever. In this way, operators still have to decide if they should accept federation with weakly identified entities or close the door and federate only with high reputation sources. To add to that, some forms of it's adoption are difficult to work around with normal methods. Mailing lists are tough, since they spoof the senders address and break dkim. And once again, the decision between allowing the old way, and just blocking anyone who doesn't have proper dkim. We see the complaints about this every time someone posts about an email server. It's hard to get the big guys to play ball. On the other hand, every time email comes up, people complain that there's too much spam.

fragmede 6y ago
A server operator can blacklist domains if they want, preventing sending or receiving from spamsalot.com and can do so for whatever reason, including if they feel spamsalot.com is too weakly (or strongly) federated for that operator.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  They can, but domains are easy to spoof, which leads us to operators having to decide to accept unsigned domains and risk bad actors getting through to the filters and milters or rejecting well meaning but unsigned email servers into federation. That's a problem that can be fixed from the get go if you design a federated system that doesn't assume all actors are charitable. The major players could cut down on a huge amount of spam by only accepting signed domains, but email wasn't designed to force all email through only it's home server, so that's not as backwards compatible as you'd like. That's not however a strict federation problem, it's more of an 'email was designed to assume everyone is a good actor, before we had much proof to the contrary' problem.

fragmede 6y ago

A server operator can blacklist domains if they want, preventing sending or receiving from spamsalot.com and can do so for whatever reason, including if they feel spamsalot.com is too weakly (or strongly) federated for that operator.

jethro_tell 6y ago
They can, but domains are easy to spoof, which leads us to operators having to decide to accept unsigned domains and risk bad actors getting through to the filters and milters or rejecting well meaning but unsigned email servers into federation. That's a problem that can be fixed from the get go if you design a federated system that doesn't assume all actors are charitable. The major players could cut down on a huge amount of spam by only accepting signed domains, but email wasn't designed to force all email through only it's home server, so that's not as backwards compatible as you'd like. That's not however a strict federation problem, it's more of an 'email was designed to assume everyone is a good actor, before we had much proof to the contrary' problem.