Re: Internet Technology Adoption and Transition

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Ned,
At 19:53 22-04-2014, Ned Freed wrote:
>I'm not sure what the report means by "evolve", but by any reasonable
>definition, I believe SMTP continues to evolve.

Ok.

>If you're talking about standards work, the IESG just approved the RRVS
>document which specifies a new SMTP extension. In recent times we've approved
>other extensions such as MT-PRIORITY. And let's not forget about EAI, which is
>a pretty major evolution of the protocol.
>
>And this process continues. I rather expect we'll see changes in the 
>STARTTLS space in the not too distant future.
>
>If you're talking about implementations, the first thing to note is that
>given the relatively small number of implementations in wide use, a change
>to even one or two of them is significant. And while progess is slow,
>it's pretty constant from my perspective.

I was looking at it in terms of what is implemented and what is 
deployed.  There has been standards work; some of examples are 
mentioned above.  I agree that EAI is a pretty major evolution of the protocol.

>As for actual deployment, things are even more skewed, which makes them
>difficult to measure. For example, if a major wireless vendor implements the
>BINARY extension in both their client and their own server, that can affect a
>huge swath of traffic without any need for anyone else to change.

There are different ways to look at usage.  As an example, BINARY may 
be about 25% of what's deployed (please treat that figure as unverified).

>The deployment of older extensions also changes over time, and it doesn't
>always increase. I'm fairly sure I'm seeing more of ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES but
>less of NOTARY. (And yeah, I know given the relationship between the 
>two that's
>wierd. I'm just reporing what I've observed.)

The statistics I looked at show a little more of ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES.

>Moreover, there can be evolutionary changes having nothing to do with
>extensions per se. For example, it seems that not only is use of STARTTLS on
>the rise, what cipher suites are enabled seems to be changing, 
>probably because
>a lot of sites are actually paying attention to such details when prior to the
>Snoden thing they care.

I haven't look into the STARTTLS statistics recently to be able to 
compare the figures with the ones before the Snow thing.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy