In message <m0x6J45-00076xC@???>, Greg A. Woods writes:
> Come on guys! I wasn't talking about anyone who has half a clue. I'm
> talking only of dial-up IP users who have dynamic IP# assignments and
> who don't even know how to spell SMTP or VRFY, never mind know what a
> queue is!!! 99.9% of the common users have no business making direct
> SMTP connections to anyone and they should not be permitted to do so.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Gosh.
Does it ever occur to you Greg that one of your customers might well
say with exactly the same degree of conviction as yourself, "99.9% of
self-appointed censors have no business making decisions that limit
the freedom of others and they should not be permitted to do so." ?
I seem to recall that somebody once said that the only people fit to
rule were those that didn't want to, which more or less expresses the
same sentiment about people that seek to wield control over others.
> There are, of course, the "want-to-be" folks who might run Linux,
> FreeBSD, or even a commercial unix on a PC at home and who might try to
> run something like Exim as their mailer on a dial-up IP link. However I
> think we've all agreed long ago that Exim and SMTP are not suitable for
> such users and that they either need a full-time connection or to forget
> about running their own mailer.
No Greg, no such thing was ever agreed. What you say about SMTP and Exim
is totally unfounded. I and lots of other people have been using SMTP for
years on dialup links very successfully indeed, and the number of dialin
SMTP users isn't small around here --- for example, Demon recently passed
the 100,000-customer mark, and almost all of their customers use SMTP
since Demon didn't provide POP3 mail at all until just a few months ago.
As for Exim, I'm using it on dialup links and it works wonderfully.
> I'm also not talking about any kind of censorship -- the only intent is
> to enforce accountability and responsibility.
Yikes. Very reminiscent of "I'm not talking about murder, just ethnic
cleansing." Value judgements are subjective, Greg, yet here you are
trying to apply mandatory enforcement backed by a bible-thumping certainty
as if your value judgement were a universal truth. Very worrying.
I think we'd better not start discussing censorship here. It's definitely
off-charter for the list, by a million miles, and people will be unhappy.
> Talking about latency, security, reliability, and private queue control
> as advantages to direct SMTP delivery from dial-up clients is
> meaningless. Dial-up clients are inherently high-latency, low-security,
> low-reliability, and queue-less (and clue-less!). They are usually tied
> directly to the user interface and sport only minimal half-baked
> implementations.
Over in this part of the world, not only do we have lots of clued-up
dialin users, but the dialin infrastructure they use is of a very high
quality indeed. ISDN and 56K access is increasing rapidly, and it's not
uncommon for the bottlenecks to be deep within USA routes rather than on
this side of the pond. We certainly don't regard our dialin infrastructure
as you do; collosal amounts are being spent to make the access systems
very low latency, secure and reliable to provide dialin customers with
the highest quality systems possible. In that respect, the quality being
provided to individuals at home is every bit as high as to corporates,
because in most UK ISPs they use one and the same infrastructure for both.
So, what you write may make some sense in your particular area if your
local population and local systems are really as incapable as you describe,
but don't seek to apply that universally. Over here, almost all the value
judgements that you make are completely inappropriate generalizations.
Rich.
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########### More fun: Regional IP Coordinator Hertfordshire + N.London
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