Isn't his point that y! could offer IPv6 e-mail in parallel to the existing IPv4 service, putting the IPv6 machines in a subdomain ipv6.yahoo.com, so that end users and networks who want to do it can do so without bothering the others?
This doesn't sound at all like a transitional plan whatsoever. If my home and office have v6 connections, but a hotel I am staying at does not, I shouldn't need to start reconfiguring layer 7 properties in my applications.
Yes you should! You are an early adopter and that is exactly what early adopters do during a technology transition. They also complain loudly, and in technical detail, about what they had to do to make things work and that feedback is invaluable to the people tweaking systems to make them ready for the masses. So stop complaining about it unless you have a specific instance that you experienced, in which case please provide full technical details.
Some of my colleagues wont even know how to.
Then they are clearly not early adopters and have a minimal role to play during the transition. Don't bother them until we have sorted all the bugs out. The point is that we do not have to solve ALL IPV6 ISSUES FIRST, and then start using it. That's not the way any technology transition works. We are now at the point where anyone who wishes to, has access to the software that they need to trial IPv6 in some form or other. We need to encourage technically inclined people to actually deploy and use IPv6 on a regular basis and start feeding back their experiences so that issues can be dealt with. Content providers like Google and Yahoo will soon take note of the activity and find some way to join in. The fact is that IPv4 is running down to the exhaustion point in 3 to 4 years. The impacts of that will start being felt much sooner, probably within the next 12 months. That means we all have to roll up our sleeves and start trialing IPv6, climbing the learning curve, and providing trial services. Fortunately, there are some people (in R&E mostly) who have up to 10 years of operational experience with IPv6 so we are not starting from scratch. Over the past few days it is clear that a lot of North American companies are further along the IPv6 deployment curve than was previously believed. --Michael Dillon