[Standards-JIG] email best practices JEP

[Dave Cridland]

On Fri Sep 22 12:33:43 2006, Ian Paterson wrote:
> IMHO XMPP's extensibility will give IM a better chance to fight 
> SPAM wars than email has had. That is just one reason why, IMHO, 
> most people will benefit once XMPP eventually replaces the email 
> messaging protocols.

The email protocols, as a whole, are considerably more extended than 
XMPP, and represent a vast installed base that makes XMPP usage look 
like a minor blip. I'd fill in 
http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt for you, but loosely, 
there is one single thing that XMPP has that the existing email 
protocols do not, and that's a verified authoritative source for a 
particular domain.

Without going into details which are easily found, there's a gradual, 
but building, momentum to change the general deployment of email such 
that this is the case, and it's likely that it probably will be 
usable to filter spam within a decade. Will it stop spam? No, of 
course not.

But to understand why, you really need to understand that there is 
one, and only one, reason why email is plagued with spam and XMPP 
isn't, and that it has nothing to do with the technical properties of 
email at all, and much more to do with the size of the market.

So in summary:

1) XMPP will not replace ESMTP et al, to do so would take decades, 
and be of dubious benefit at best.

2) XMPP is not immune to spam, it is simply not a big enough market 
yet.

3) XMPP's technical properties do make some mechanisms for sending 
spam harder, but these properties are gradually being deployed in 
email.

Dave.
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Dave Cridland - mailto:dave at cridland.net - xmpp:dwd at jabber.org
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