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The future of email: From smtp to xmpp (anarchogeek.com)
16 points by rabble on June 20, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



Sorry about the double post, i wrote the article and posted it, but somebody else had already put it up. Woops. I wrote the post, went to sleep, and submitted in the morning. I read the site, but not while i sleep.


"I read the site, but not while i sleep."

We really need to work on your REM productivity... :P


Perhaps I'm missing it, but what does changing the delivery protocol buy you? XMPP does little to nothing more than email in terms of sender verification. SPAM would continue unabated.


> XMPP does little to nothing more than email in terms of sender verification.

SMTP doesn't do any verification at all, does it? XMPP uses SSL if possible and otherwise does a dialback so you can at least be sure the message was sent from the server it claims to be from.

The other aspect is that XMPP is young enough that it can still change to do more (since there are only a handful of clients and servers, as compared to SMTP). As far as I can tell, SMTP is completely stagnant and any improvements that can't be made unilaterally won't happen. (I'm not very familiar with SMTP, I'd love to be proven wrong.)


SPF allows some verification of mail servers and some antispam systems will do an SMTP callback to verify that the sender address is a valid address.


How widely are those deployed? Can you get away with ignoring submissions from servers that don't have them set up?


No, not even close. SPF is not a spam prevention measure. It's just a way of protecting innocent senders from being impersonated by spammers. DKIM does a better job at the same purpose.


Wasn't this posted yesterday?

EDIT: Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222424

If you don't read this site, why submit to it?




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