[ih] email at scale

[paul vixie]

On 5/15/2012 4:25 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>
>
> On 5/14/2012 8:50 PM, paul vixie wrote:
>> ...
>> we digress.
>
> possibly not.  to the extent the list seeks to agree on explanations
> for what happened (or didn't happen), some agreement about analytic
> criteria could help.  And the meaning of 'at scale' strikes me as
> worth distinguishing for Internet discussions.

very well. i prefer your wider (multiple administrations) meaning for
'at scale' over my narrower (walled garden) meaning. in that case i'd
say, human to human messaging at scale remains an unsolved problem. and
i'd go further and say, doing human messaging at scale in a way that
secures the interests of the humans at the endpoints against unwanted
traffic, undeserved rejection, eavesdropping, corruption of format or
content, forgery or identity theft, or misdirection is Hard to even Imagine.

noting, i'm a happy user of pgp, but i have only 2*10^3 keys in my key
ring, whereas there are 2*10^9 internet users today out of a worldwide
population of 6*10^9. i don't think we're going to get where we need to
go using pgp, nor anything like pgp.

the economics here favour the walled gardens. the quality of human to
human communications one gets within a walled garden like facebook or
google, or within an enterprise e-mail environment like microsoft
exchange or digital all-in-one, has always been higher than what we've
had on The Internet. the historical take on this is, quality isn't as
compelling as reach.

paul

-- 
"I suspect I'm not known as a font of optimism." (VJS, 2012)