Damn, yes, it really should. Say, a network administrator at AOL makes a
"little" mistake while configuring the main routers, so AOL will be
completely down for ... 10 minutes. Even in this 10 minutes *lots* of mail
*would* have been delivered to some of the millions(?) of AOL users. So
your protocol would force thousands of mail clients to retry their
delivery. If the clients were dial-in users, they wourd be forced to be
online for each retry. With a protocol that allows relay servers (like
SMTP) they can go offline and lay back without worrying what happens to
their mail. And even when the relay server is unable to deliver the mail,
it is not lost - the sender will recieve an notify when the relay server
gives up (after a reasonable period of time).
On the opposite side of that, with the current SMTP/POP protocols Say a
network administrator at AOL makes a "little" mistake while configuring the
main routers, so AOL will be completely down for ... 10 minutes. Even in
this 10 minutes *lots* of mail *would* be unable to be sent by some of the
millions(?) of AOL users because their SMTP server is down. So the current
protocol would force thousands of mail clients to retry their delivery. If
the clients were dial-in users, they wourd be forced to be online for each
retry.
The current protocol is just as susceptible to server outages as the
proposed would be. With the proposed protocol the user would be at the
mercy of the receiving server instead of the sending server.
In a preemptive response to "If the SMTP server is down, use a different
SMTP server" *Very few* E-Mail users would or know how to re-configure
their SMTP server. The response to server outages should not be "Re
configure your SMTP server", but rather should be "Why did the server go
down" and "Why isn't there a backup"?
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