"The flaws [in SMTP] are so severe, some now believe, that the protocol that gave rise to the most significant explosion in written communication since Gutenberg may no longer be capable of serving its purpose in a world of con artists, pornographers, virus authors and unscrupulous spammers," reports CNet.
"You have to remember the era in which this protocol was designed," said Sluizer, the self-described "grandmother" of SMTP. "Back in the time we were doing this work, we were talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of sites on what was then called the Arpanet. We were looking at connecting with a few in Europe and some smaller networks in the U.S. "It was a trusted situation, and the protocols were developed on the basis of that trust. So it's very surprising to me that we are using the same protocols coming up on 25 years later, because you need different things in a commercial environment than you need in a research environment."
Comment: Nice to see more people attacking SMTP, which I did in Online in June. It's long past time to dump Sendmail as well.....
