The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?

Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article at The Register claiming that it's time we stop using email to communicate. From the article: "The problem is, email is now integral to the lives of perhaps a billion people, businesses, and critical applications around the world. It's a victim of its own success. It's a giant ship on a dangerous collision course. All sorts of brilliant, talented people today put far more work into fixing SMTP in various ways (with anti-virus, anti-phishing technologies, anti-spam, anti-spoofing cumbersome encryption technologies, and much more) than could have ever been foreseen in 1981. But it's all for naught."

Comments

hit enter too soon, oops

[SuperBanana]

It's funny how many of these problems would be at least partially solved by proper DNS.

...and postfix checks, blah blah. The reason these CAN'T be enabled, and I have tried on a volunteer site I help run- is because many major internet service providers don't have proper forward and reverse DNS set up for their mail clusters. A certain major cable company in Florida comes to mind; a list member spent 2 hours trying to explain to the tech support grunts that the problem was that a machine in their outgoing mail server cluster didn't have a reverse IP address. They kept trying to troubleshoot DNS on HIS computer, despite his pleas for them to just forward his report to the infrastructure guys- that they would understand. We kept running across these bozo internet service providers, and had to give up.

Aside from that...when I enabled just "HELO domain must match the domain of the hostname found by reverse lookup", spam volume dropped by over half. Enabling "MAIL FROM must match" cut it even further, since almost all spam claims to be from something else.