At 10:23 AM +0900 11/11/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The second is that for a bounded cost[1], you can implement signed mail.
For dozens of years, we've been telling people that once they have enough RAM and fast enough disk drives, the single biggest bottleneck in scaling up large mail systems is the filesystem, and overhead with regards to sychronous meta-data updates. Signed mail causes the CPU of the mail server to have to do expensive crypto calculations that are many, many orders of magnitude beyond anything that had ever been done in the past, on a per-message basis. With signed mail, no amount of RAM, or fast disk drives, or smart filesystems will save you. You need high-speed crypto accelerators for web servers, because of all those encrypted SSL connections which are used for secure transactions. And yet, those are still just the tiniest fraction of all web connections. What happens when SSL is the default? And that's on a per-connection basis, where each connection might be able to represent hundreds or thousands or millions of individual transactions/messages. What happens when you have to do that level of crypto calculations on a per-message basis? At that point, you might as well just shut down all Internet e-mail anyway. > With current technology this is something of a cost, but for spammers > it's pure cost, for the rest of us it's arguably a fringe benefit much > of the time. This is much more effective where usable, because the > signature identifies the sender to some degree, which spammers do not > want. Actually, spammers have totally unlimited CPU power available to them, so they might be the only ones on the planet who are able to handle doing signed e-mail for all messages. It doesn't matter that the signed message is actually traceable back to a particular person, it just matters that it's signed. -- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006. If you have an old e-mail account for me at this domain, please make sure you correct that with the current address. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
