[spambayes-dev] Re: Standards for Filtering

[Neil Schemenauer]

Yakov Shafranovich:
> We have been thinking about different ways that standards can help
> the filtering community and what we currently have on the table is
> standard headers and dynamic filtering updates (like anti-virus
> programs do).

It's probably more drastic than what you are intending, but I think
STMP should stop being a "store and forward" protocol.  Instead, the
connection should remain open until the message is delivered to the
final destination (at least as near as possible) or a failure
occurs.  I think the only change to the SMTP protocol necessary is
to disallow multiple envelope recipient addresses.  Changes to SMTP
servers could be made in a backwards compatible way.

Separate bounce messages do not work anymore.  I think almost
everyone can agree on that now.  However, the current SMTP
protocol/implementation needs to send separate bounces otherwise it
is unreliable.  SMTP was designed for an age when links between
sites were very unreliable.  In that age, moving a message closer to
its destination hop by hop made sense.  Now it is no longer
necessary.

  Neil