[snip]
Peering relationships work for BGP (lots of rules) and they worked
for USENET (not many rules). Why can't the same principles be applied
to email or IM services?
Where is NickC when you need him... this sounds like something out of his
layer4 nap idea...
Seriously, do we really need SMTP peering agreements? I don't know of too
many places that are UUCPing their email... SMTP traffic already crosses
(BGP) peering agreement controlled links. If putting contractional
obligations there fails to work why should we believe some new and less
understood system would be any more effective?
Greg Maxwell writes on 12/3/2003 11:39 AM:
Seriously, do we really need SMTP peering agreements? I don't know of too
many places that are UUCPing their email... SMTP traffic already crosses
(BGP) peering agreement controlled links. If putting contractional
obligations there fails to work why should we believe some new and less
understood system would be any more effective?
What about speaking plain old smtp, but with transport / mailertable rules routing all mail for domain X (say AOL or MSN) to "special access" servers that have firewall ACLs allowing only connections from a restricted set of IPs?
So AOL talks to (say) us and says "hey, instead of mail from our users waiting like all other mail to connect to port 25 on your MXs, set aside a cluster of MXs that'll permit smtp connections from [this /24]"
We then take these emails and deliver them as usual. Just that AOL mail to our users gets delivered faster, doesn't clutter our MXs ... and we can send mail to AOL over a similar back channel.
As a bonus, monitoring and controlling spam on these would be far easier.
Yes it won't scale. But it is not intended to scale - it is just intended to be a series of agreements between large providers that will -
* reduce congestion / endless mail queues on regular MXs / outbound machines.
* let inbound / outbound flowing through that back channel get more easily managed [and monitored for spam] than if it were to take the usual route.
Think of it as taking a short cut through a toll road instead of the usual toll free traffic jammed highway.
srs