I think that we are going to find ourselves in serious need to
transport mechanisms that make "do you want something of size Z, whose
subject is 'aaaaa' from...." transactions easy.
Some of us were discussing this earlier today. One of my colleagues here
advanced the idea of an MTA that, recognizing a destination as "non-local"
(whatever that might mean), would hang on to a "large" message and instead
send only a pointer to it. The recipient of the pointer could get the
original by doing something simple like sending a reply to the pointer
message. It might look like:
Reply-To: My-Org-MTA(_at_)mysite(_dot_)edu
Subject: Large message, ID <some-unique-msg-id>
From: <original sender>
Content-Type: Multipart; boundary = foobar
--foobar
A message of 8,394,721 bytes was addressed to you. To receive this
message in its entirety, send a reply to this message. The first 20
lines of the original message are enclosed below.
- My-Org-MTA(_at_)mysite(_dot_)edu
--foobar
...<original message>
--foobar--
Or, perhaps an alternate form of the External-Reference subtype could
reference message-id and MTA rather than filename and site.
- RL "Bob" Morgan
Networking Systems
Stanford
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