[ipv6-wg] I thought e-mail over IPv6 was easy

On Apr 9, 2014, at 10:47 AM, Geert Jan de Groot <GeertJan.deGroot at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>> I saw the headline for this article and thought, "wtf, e-mail just
>> worked over IPv6 from the time I put the AAAA record in the DNS". But I
>> went ahead and had a look, and it is actually pretty interesting:
>> http://engineering.linkedin.com/email/sending-and-receiving-emails-over-ipv6
> 
> Actually, it's even more complicated than that.
> 
> I need to send mail directly instead of "use the provider relay" because
> the provider relay doesn't allow me to check whether mail is still queued - 
> not all the world has reliable mail delivery, unfortunately and for
> the people I work with, this is an issue.
> 
> For IPv4, it's easy for an ISP to set up stub forward & reverse records
> and that's what I got away with for many, many years.
> 
> For IPv6, the situation is different. As discussed, users have more than
> one address and hence may need need more than one forward/reverse pair,
> and the address may not be predictable.  This gives new problems:
> * If the connection is big enough to warrant delegation, then making
>  FCrDNS work for IPv6 is doable.
>  For small businesses and home power users however, this may not be
>  feasible. 
> * Making forward & reverse match for every /48 of every customer is
>  a challenge;
> * Delegating may not be feasible. 
>  How do you delegate to "John's pet animal and sushi shop"? 
>  The guy probably doesn't run a DNS server to delegate to..
> * Making Dynamic DNS updates work between ISP and customer is a challenge
>  at best;
> * I have not seen any portal solutions, to let the customer handle this.
>  Even with XS4all, for whom I am a customer, doesn't have an 
>  automated way for this and the current workaround involves manual 
>  intervention with all it's nasty scaling properties.
> * I don't think that customer-specific subdomains and SPF-records will
>  scale either.
> 
> I don't hear much of this new, IPv6-specific problem. Comments?

Folks at M3AAWG are looking into these problems.  I am aware of the work which was started close
to 2 years ago but have not contributed nor am I closely following right now.  But I would encourage interesting parties to
have a look.  Next M3AAWG meeting is in Brussels in June.

FWIW there was a great lightning talk about v6 email SPAM concerns back at APRICOT 2012.

Seeing all the recent threads on v6 and email on many operator groups is at least a sign to me that more people are
now for real looking at the issues :) 

- merike
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