[Emailcore] Re: [Last-Call] Re: Re: Your (Roman's) DISCUSS on draft-ietf-emailcore-as and status of the document

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On 25 Sep 2026, at 14:14, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:
> That's non-responsive to Dave's point.  He asked a very specific question.

He asked if I would be okay with a change that resulted in me not being able to depend on getting email from my employer. I was pointing out that that is the current situation.
> It'd be a weak signal indeed.  Do you think the user who sent you mail would be in any position to make a change?
> 
Well, if I send email and get a bounce back saying that my mail agent isn't behaving correctly, I'm certainly going to report it, at least the first few times. And if I'm the CEO, I'm probably going to get listened to. So in fact I think this is a useful signal. But if it doesn't get paid attention to, we aren't substantially worse off—we'll just communicate some other way, as is already often the case.
> Most people here have little control over how their email is handled.  I'd be curious if ANYONE here has turned off receipt of unencrypted receipt in SMTP.  Anyone?  Bueller...  
> 
I don't think Fastmail offers this as a feature, unfortunately. If I were still running my own SMTP server, I would definitely turn it off, and I'd also disable delivery of unencrypted SMTP. To be clear, I'd want to be able to allow-list certain senders, and I'd want to be able to turn it back on on demand, because a lot of sites use email for 2fa, and I don't know if they send their codes using STARTTLS.

But as I mentioned, I'm not normal. And I live in a place where the government communicates with me through apps, whether I want that or not. So reliable email is something I wish I had, rather than something I'd desperately try to approximate, despite the impossibility of actually doing so.

You might sense a contradiction here: why am I paying fastmail for email service when I have so little faith in it? It's because it's still useful for some things, e.g. IETF communication. Here I don't care about confidentiality, and if email doesn't get delivered, it's not great, but it _is_ verifiable, because I can look in the archive if I really want to be sure. The aforementioned 2fa. News delivery. But to the extent I can avoid it, I don't use it for business, and you shouldn't either. :)