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Re: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt



On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 21:21:15 EST, Hector Santos said:
> mindset.  Quite frankly,  there seems to be conflictive old guru closed
> minded attitude about the realities of the mail industry delimas which
> perpetuates a dearth of interest to finally address the issues one way or
> another.    You guys (speaking in general) need to listen and begin "opening
> your minds."

What is often mistaken as "old guru closed mind attitude" is the experience
to be able to tell that *any* proposal in category X is doomed to failure unless
problems A, B, and C are addressed, and any proposal in Y has almost-certain
fatal flaws D and E, and so on.

Another common error is failing to understand the realities of scaling and deployment.
It would take me a short afternoon to put something up to test, understanding that
it was beta-quality software.  Getting everybody in my department moved is a
much bigger challenge, and migrating 60K users is a year-long proposition, and
migrating the millions of users of an AOL or Hotmail is a daunting issue indeed.
(Hint - how many extra first-line help desk people would AOL need to hire, and
what would the price be for that?  Is the cost of the migration more than their
current anti-spam costs, or not?  Don't forget to include burning 100M new
coaster^H^H^H^H^H CD's with 'AOL 10.0 - now with new anti-spam' on it).

TV ads.  Lots of them.  You'll need them.  If you don't understand why,
don't bother commenting until you do. ;)

Oh, and don't forget that you're not allowed to break anybody's connectivity at any
point along the line.  The NCP->IP migration was bad enough wnen there were only
several hundred hosts.  We'll never get to do that again.  If you have half the users
migrated to SMTP-bis and half are still on SMTP-classic, they *will* have to
be able to communicate, or you *will* be fired.

So for instance, the previous paragraph is why *any* proposal that doesn't provide
benefit until 98% or so of the net has deployed it is doomed to fail unless you give
a *really* good explanation of why 98% of the people should deploy it when it isn't
going to give them any benefit if 3% of the OTHER people don't bother....


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