On Sun, 1 May 2005, Will Yardley wrote:
Is it time to break out the "Please do not feed the trolls" sign?
Feeding 'em anyway... but *plonk* for Mr. Anderson. For those who are masochists, read on.
On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 10:50:29PM -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
But only 16 email clients (counting Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox separately), support SMTP AUTH. But there are more than 1000 different email client programs.
Firefox isn't an email client... maybe you're thinking of Thunderbird?
Thats it.
There may be lots of programs, but most / all of the ones that people actually USE support SMTP auth. Most of the less popular ones I've heard of / seen support SMTP auth as well - Becky!, The Bat, Mulberry, OS X's Mail.app. I could probably name more than 16 off the top of my head[2].
Better yet, try to name 16 mail clients people _actually use_ which DON'T, other than MUA-only programs like mailx and mutt with no SMTP support at all. When I worked at a mediumish sized hosting company with probably well over 100k mail users, I can't _ever_ recall hearing about a complaint of a customer using a mail client that didn't support SMTP auth.
This off-list message from Jay is probably relevant: Jay had some better points to make: ============================================================ On Mon, 2 May 2005, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 10:50:29PM -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
Your comparison is precious. Its a classic sort of statistical deception, at the extreme. With seat belts, there is mandated 100% compliance. With SMTP AUTH, there is presently approximately 0.16% compliance. Lets round that up: Say 0.2% support. SMTP AUTH got 0.2% of the mail clients.
.2% by *brand name*.
That shows they didn't get vendor participation.
What percentage by *deployment*?
Deployment changes over time.
*Who* is gaming statistics, Dean?
Not I. If customers don't want it, and other vendors don't pick it up, why should the current vendors continue to support it? Just more bug potential. The people who say "90% of the world is Outlook", speak very little information about the market. Its like saying the US is the only superpower. Today, perhaps. Tomorrow may be a different story. If .2% of the countries signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, it would be a failure. Even if those .2% included China, which includes 1/4 the worlds population, it would still be a failure. And Communism can't be wrong, either, 2 billion chinese say so. ============================================================
With seat belts, there is mandated 100% compliance. With SMTP AUTH, there is presently approximately 0.16% compliance.
Bullshit. The percentage as measured by number of actual USERS is high, since 99.99% [1] of all users are using an MUA which supports SMTP auth.
Speaking of bullshit, Almost none of those mailservers are using SMTP AUTH. Being capable of configuring SMTP AUTH is completely different from saying it is in use. Next you'll be saying DECnet is still highly deployed because every Cisco can run LAT. -- Av8 Internet Prepared to pay a premium for better service? www.av8.net faster, more reliable, better service 617 344 9000