[linux-elitists] DoD and standards.

[Phil Mayers]

>However, I think that the problems that spam, phishing, and email worms
>have caused make it increasingly difficult to defend that open system.

SMTP needs to die. The most realistic candidate to replace it IMHO is 
federated XMPP with appropriate semantics for store+forward, mailing 
lists and forwarding (easier to handle, as the s2s link can use callback 
to authenticate the forwarder).

Scalability is a concern, but with DomainKeys imparting a per-message 
crypto check (and a more-than-somewhat complex one, at that) I can 
imagine the costs reaching parity or the differences disappearing into 
the noise soon.

There's the flag-day problem to solve, but frankly the alternatives of 
forever poorly-functioning DKIM/SPF alternatives or worse, 
balkanisation, make this attractive to me.

It's also a much better protocol for some of the ad-hoc uses e.g. file 
transfer, cron job output collation, out-of-office/presence and rich 
formatting, than SMTP+MIME. It even has VoIP support (though how that 
will cooperate or compete with SIP remains to be seen).

We are of course talking about a decade or more before even a slight 
amount of progress is made.