I recall when I thought STARTTLS was a good idea... Now, I know than having a transparent port and a TLS port is really important. For many protocols, a trans

I recall when I thought STARTTLS was a good idea... Now, I know than having a transparent port and a TLS port is really important. For many protocols, a transparent port is "enough" and crypto should actually be handled in a upper layer (like for email). But the transparent protocol should be "retarded", like for basic/core SMTP, S stands for 'S'imple. A bad actor able to glean metadata from a transparent port can certainly do much more anyway.