william@elan.net wrote (on Jun 20):
Paul Vixie has been talking about mail peering for years. Unlike him I personally do not believe exact equivalent of BGP peering for mail is a solution and will ever happen.
Never say never. :) As blandly as stated it would be unworkable, though. Though I recall people saying similar about ipv6.
But there is intermediate altenative - create organization with all isps as its members (kind of like ARIN/APNIC/RIPE for mail service providers) and have all downstream corporate customers be required to either also be member of this organization or relay email through its isp. Do note that
I'm not sure this helps. In the same way that being an LIR of, say, RIPE doesn't in fact mean you have any clue how the Internet is put together at the BGP level, so joining a club that lets you run a mail- relay doesn't mean anything about you ability to do so in a clean way. If you mean I can grass up a relay for sending naughty messages, then the beaurocracy of ARIN/RIPE I can do without. Nothing gets resolved quickly and the issue will remain until it is. The attractiveness of the "peering" idea is that I, representative of my network have some direct legal recourse against someone who breaks the rules. No 3rd parties required. I can pinpoint the offenders. I don't need to shutdown the peering, but I have legal means with which to raise the issue - assuming of course it went into the agreement. The details beyond this gets messy and way OT, but it does have aspects that appeal, though with a lot of work. -C