Why is Email So Complicated?
An Outline
0-99: Background -- facts about email
#0: An Introduction
#1: We don't know what email is
-- Human: A fundamental type of human interaction via IT. Open, independent, unauthenticated, can't see message in recipient's view
-- No single design: competing designers, feature approaches
-- History of Email
-- Future evolution of email
-- The fundamental nature of spam
earlier notes
-- The inevitability of spam (game theory & nash equilibria)
100-199: Technical Complexity
#101: There's Just Too Much Of It
#114 -- Dumb Robots, Complex Vacations
#127 -- There's No Central Authority
#146 -- We're Slaves to Our Attachments
#150 -- We Don't Know Who It's From
-- Data collection about email
-- Performance
-- Languages and character sets
-- Mobility (from POP/IMAP to smartphones)
-- Reputations: Whitelisting, blacklisting, and more
-- Authentication by payment
-- Authentication by Turing Test
-- Delivery confirmation/return receipt
-- Mailing list management
-- Quoting conventions
-- Interoperability challenges (e.g. Notes, Exchange...)
-- The role of the DNS in email delivery and security
-- Queueing, routing, logging, bouncing, and black holes
-- Traceability (or not)
-- The challenges of filtering
-- SMTP submission and relays
-- Calling back a message
-- Email: Why not just start over?
-- MUA Diversity: what it is and what it means
-- Where to put a signature file
-- Delivery to multitenant MTA with copies in multiple domains
200-299: Historical Complexity
-- Necessity of backwards compatibility
-- 7, 8, and 36 bit data
#221: The Legacy of Punch Cards
-- What's a line of text, anyway? CRLF convention
-- Gateways and addressing
-- Uncertainty of what's out there
-- Tool entrenchment (sendmail, Exchange...)
300-399 Political Complexity
-- Competing interests in standards
-- Commercial rivalries
#362: Too Many Lazy Idiots
-- Hostile implementors
-- The nature of reputations
-- The challenges of data sharing (reputation, logging, tracing)
-- Collaborative filtering
-- Registrars
-- Ideology (PGP, data havens, wiretaps)
-- Internationalized domains
-- Internationalized email addresses -- Agreeing on payment models
-- The role of standards in spam control
400-499 Ethical and Legal Complexity
-- What do we mean by security? Hisotry, details, prospects
-- The problem of jurisdictions (~200!)
-- Fraud, phishing, etc.
*-- Regulatory compliance (archiving/retention/etc)
-- Email and corporate liability
-- Email as evidence: how trustworthy (esp. sender identity)?
-- Illegal content and wiretapping
-- The many faces of spam-fighting
#409: Murky Ethics
-- Spam vigilantism (DOS, etc.)
-- The privacy/anonymity vs spam tradeoff
-- The role of education in spam control
-- The role of laws in spam control
-- The role of law enforcement in spam control
500-599 Social Complexity
-- Social engineering by the bad guys
-- Distinguishing a bad guy from a hijacked good guy
#562: People Lie
-- How big an attachment is OK?
-- How big a signature is OK?
-- Is HTML email OK?
-- Quote at the top or the bottom?
-- Accidental delivery (DLP) -- mistyped addresses, cc's, forwards
-- Ignorance of or hostility to standards and conventions
-- Overwhelming complexity of standards for newbies
-- Management-demanded stupidity
-- Corporate email renegades
600-699 Future Complexity
-- Social Network integration
-- Payment systems (direct, bonded sender, attention bonds, charity stamps, new currencies, computation/hashcash, etc.)
-- Automatic translation (languages and media types)
-- Matter transport (sooner than you think)
-- The Interplanetary Internet (Cerf):
-- Everything old is new again (asynchrony)
-- Encapsulation a la MHTML
-- Active Messaging
Open stuff
**** Need to add calendars, DKIM/SPF/etc,
**** Need to collect spam items together