ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: 7/8-bit conversion vs. bouncing

1991-07-03 08:11:37
Hi, Rayan,

The show-stopper for me in the completely-new-protocol department is
alluded to in at least some of the RFC-ZZZZ drafts.  How do you know
when to use which protocol?  Suppose that you prefer to use protocol A
over protocol B--let's say you have to do conversion or bounces or
something for protocol B, and you'd rather not have to do whatever it
takes.  Suppose now you have a message to send, and suppose that it's
something that really uses the features of protocol A.  You try protocol
A and you can't get through, or you get some other kind of
try-again-later failure.  Do you immediately fall over to protocol B,
losing information or bouncing to the sender or whatever?  If not, how
long do you hold on to the message, retrying protocol A, before you fall
over to protocol B?  You can be wrong in either direction here.  Hold on
too long, and you delay mail just because your destination site doesn't
implement protocol A but you couldn't tell.  Hold on too short a time,
and you do whatever unpleasantness protocol B carries with it, maybe
dropping features or X.400 body parts or whatever.

                Craig